The Alchemist's Euphoria

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The group’s resulting seventh album, ‘The Alchemist’s Euphoria’, is a whipsmart collection that pings from classic Kasabian piss-up chant-alongs (scything lead single ‘ALYGATYR’; the tellingly titled ‘ROCKET FUEL’) to starry eyed ballads – with, perhaps surprisingly, the emphasis on the latter. The first is a generic MOR phone-torch-waver, the third an electronic burble with a cursory verse, while the second spends its last couple of minutes doing the laziest thing a track supposedly about space can do – emulating the sound of early-70s Pink Floyd, right down to the Nick Mason-style rolls around the drum kit. Of the new album, Kasabian’s seventh, Serge comments: “One thing about this record I feel over the other ones, is it definitely feels like a body of work that belongs together. Kasabian’s future seemed very much in doubt without their former frontman to sell the band’s unique brand of psychedelic party anthems.

Rocket Fuel rolls in like the Prodigy, Pizzorno declaiming over a Middle Eastern-style riff, with a bassy thud that hits in the chest, resolving into a soaring refrain. They require some sort of attitude to transcend their meaninglessness, and Pizzorno can only really reach that when he’s rapping (on Scriptvre and Rocket Fuel, notably). Now, bands can thrive when a replacement singer comes from within the ranks: Pink Floyd and Genesis seemed to do OK for themselves after the loss of Syd Barrett and Peter Gabriel respectively.Kasabian have always been about having a good fucking time, and although this is understandably their most introspective record yet, it does point to euphoria ahead. It is Kasabian's first album in five years, following For Crying Out Loud (2017), and first to feature Serge Pizzorno as a sole lead vocalist after former frontman Tom Meighan was fired in 2020 amid his domestic assault conviction. In 2020, the day after his departure from Kasabian was announced, he was convicted of assaulting his partner, and in due course Pizzorno decided he was going to take centre stage.

The eerie indelibility of Days are Forgotten, or Fire’s lumpen power, are missing, leaving the strings of lyrical cliches that Pizzorno ladles up horribly exposed. So kann man den Umsatz „körperlicher“ Tonträger immer weiter zurückfahren und sich danach über die bösen, bösen Streamingdienste beschweren.But for every one of those there’s Doug Yule taking charge of the Velvet Underground and recording Squeeze, or the two albums the Doors made with Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger singing after the death of Jim Morrison, albums so non-canonical that I defy any but the most committed Doors obsessive to even name them. Serge, always the chin-stroking auteur to Meighan’s endorphin-inducing rabble-rouser, had to – as he puts it on this album’s ravey ‘SCRVPTURE’ – “reach for the mic as I walk from the shadow”. The seventh Kasabian album nods in those directions without stepping conclusively towards them, and offers up some of the bullish, uptempo rock that sets moshpits roiling. Pero tras cuatro o cinco escuchas solamente puedo decir que me parece un álbum muy interesante y con algunas canciones sobresalientes. And that presence is needed when you’re delivering lyrics such as: “Jet packs / Life in a simulator / Drip feed / Straight to the incubator.