Kaiser Chiefs doing Glastonbury: Nore cries just a little more. Something involving KT Tunstall and the environment. I might finally get to own a whole Pipettes album.
Huh, done. No more really old articles! Now onwards and upwards...
Second albums, in my opinion, are a bitch and half and rarely meet up to the expectations we (fans, media, nit-picking sons of bitches) place upon them. Few, if any, bands reach the goal given to them by the press. Second albums are also particularly hard if your band is incredibly famous and has been placed on a pedestal. I predict that Arctic Monkeys will have this problem when they release their sophomore album later this spring. But the topic of our discussion is not Arctic Monkeys but their theoretical forefathers, the Kaiser Chiefs.
According to Drowned in Sound, Yours Truly, Angry Mob is bland. At the end of the review, Dom Gourlay the reviewer states, "The sad thing is that while nobody expects Kaiser Chiefs to be re-inventing the wheel, we do expect a pretty rock-solid, perfect pop record. Yours Truly, Angry Mob most definitely isn't rock solid or perfect in any sense." This statement, in my opinion, is exactly why any band will fail on their second album. You can't expect perfection, from anyone, and then also expect them to out perform themselves next time. As a listener, you will be consistently disappointed if that is what you expect. A band can only reinvent themselves so many times before it completely loses its sense of self.
The same complaint made by Drowned in Sound is brought up by Pitchfork, but at least Eric Harvey gave the band the courtesy of giving the the album a 5. My question is, what exactly were these reviewers expecting? I was expecting something better than Employment but not so drastically different from that first album that the band is unrecognizable (a la The Killers and Sam's Town). Incremental improvement, not huge leaps and bounds, is the most important thing to me, but I must be in the minority. An interesting point, though, was made by This is Fake DIY in their review of Yours Truly, Angry Mob: Some music has to be lived in. Repeatedly listening to an album and letting it stew might seem antithetical to doing a proper review, but sometimes that's what is needed. Or, as James McCrimmon put it in his review: "By no means all things to all men, Kaiser Chiefs do what they do better than anyone else. Give this a chance to get into your head, and you'll have your proof."
As stated at the beginning, second albums are a bitch and half. The media and press just make it 10 times harder. So why not just enjoy the damn album on face value? Some goals cannot be achieved and "rock solid or perfect" shouldn't be achieved the second time around, because were do you go from there?
Disclaimer: I do realize how horribly biased I am on the topic of Kaiser Chiefs, but the views stated in the above can apply to almost any band or album out there. It just happens that I disagree with a lot of the reviews (at least a lot of the reviews that I pay attention to) for YTAM.
And now on a light note from jeffs_odyssey "Ricky after he fell into us and nearly had his shirt torn off." If look closely you can even see the scratches on his left arm. Not that I'm looking because his manly chest hair is distracting me. 0_0
He's so cute, he even has his eyes closed!! :group "aww":
Have a good night.
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