Written by Alex Metcalfe and Photographs by Brandon Gray
What – or who – is the definitive sound of rock and roll music in the 21st Century? You know, that new band or sound that got started out in and around the same time that George W. Bush was elected President of the USA; that punk genre/aesthetic became a joke; that September 11th happened; that Napster destroyed the record label business model; that the Internet evolved in to the dominant information source and not a dial-tone after thought; etc etc.
Well, who do you think it is? What do they sound like? Obviously since everybody is a Rolling Stones editor now, our answers will differ like the sun and the moon. But my answer is Kasabian. And it’s been Kasabian ever since I heard their debut money-maker “Club Foot.”
Kasabian, if you don’t already know, are a 5-piece rock outfit hailing from some middle-of-the-road county called Leicestershire in England – an otherwise forgettable stop in your travels across a country with more interesting places to be. Kasabian have been around since the late 1990s, but nobody gave a damn about them or their heavy-handed brand of Brit rock until the cultural zeitgeist of the U.K. tired of the Spice Girls’ bubbly nonsense and Oasis’ equally bubbly nonsense. I think that that happened sometime around 2002, but alas, my dates could be slightly inaccurate.
Since their popularity breakout in 2003-2004, Kasabian have enjoyed a steady rise to rock and roll superstardom in the U.K. and Europe while carving out more of a niche market in the United States and Canada. For example, Kasabian will happily perform at the London O2 arena for 20,000 of their fans. But, when they hop across the pond and perform in a city like, say, Toronto, you’ll find Kasabian performing for a decidedly smaller, though equally energetic crowd of fans at a venue like the Kool Haus.
Sadly, Kasabian will only do that kind of Toronto visit every 6 or 7 years. So, when they do show up, you can wager that that niche market will snap up those GA tickets like hot cakes and sell that cool house out. And that’s exactly what happened last Thursday when Kasabian filled the Kool Haus with fans and then filled it with their sweet, sweet brand of what I call Millennium Rock. I know, real original.
Kasabian’s shows are a bare bones light-and-rock show formula; the only thing that’s remotely close to a stage prop at a Kasabian show is the amp stacks on stage. And those are for the pseudo-efficient, loud delivery of music, not for anything aesthetical or what have you.
Between the lights, the expertly-blended music that makes the Kool Haus sound like Massey Hall (almost…) and the band’s charisma, there isn’t much room left on stage for anything else that would “add” to the band’s live show. They already know how to structure an intro song with a light show. They already know that downtime between songs is a buzz-kill. They already know that crowd pleasers like “Club Foot” and “Think As Thieves” can be played for almost 8 minutes per song. So what else does this band need? I’ll tell you what: they don’t need just about anything you’d see at a Lady Gage concert. (Because they have actual talent.)
Kasabian even knows how to incorporate the name of the city they’re visiting in to their lyrics about dinosaurs. That’s right, the song “Velociraptor” did become “Torontoraptor,” a gesture that made my Millennium Rock Irony Meter go wild.
I came to this show expecting Kasabian to do a straight-off-the-albums kind of performance. Instead, I got to see what Millennium Rock is all about: using the recorded albums as nothing but a stepping stone for a live concert that brings the music to life in ways that 21st Century recording techniques can’t. Yes, I’m talking about you, Auto-Tune! There’s no doubt in my mind that Kasabian were made for the stage.
I’d always known that that Kasabian has a solid fan base in North America. With songs like “L.S.F,” “Thick As Thieve,” and their encore finale-slash-biggest hit “Fire,” I knew that Kasabian would put a set together that ensured a pleasantly satisfied crowd. What I didn’t know was that Kasabian’s North American fan base (read: Toronto fan base) could be so taken with the band that a Kool Haus-sized crowd could chant the meaningless “naaaaa na na na” closing line of “L.S.F.” for almost the entire duration of their pre-encore caesura. Millennium Rock for the win? I think so.
For me, Kasabian’s encore epitomized the message we get from Millennium Rock: it’s equal parts hate and love. In their encore opener, “Switchblade Smiles,” Kasabian rallied the crowd in a dubious display of middle finger brandishing. I thought to myself “Fuck you? Is this really Kasabian’s message?” Thankfully, “fuck you” wasn’t Kasabian’s concluding message at all. The band finished off their Kool Haus set with “Fire,” a song that saw lead vocalist Tom Meighan motivating the audience to join their hands in to a heart symbol. It was adorable.
Seeing as I am suggesting that Kasabian are the purveyors of Milleniums Rock, something that I think makes them one of the essential musical voices of the 2000s, I found it fitting that their concluding message for Toronto would be one part hate and one part love – the perfect metaphor for a decade in recent history that has explored the duality of hate and love in extreme circumstances.
