May 16, 2004

Kaiser Chiefs : Oh My God

...too darn good to be ignored...

Once a month something strange and beautiful happens in Leeds. It's not when the full moon glows in the sky, and it's not when the football team run naked through the streets. It's when the last Tuesday rolls around and all the cool kids head down to a club night called Pigs - where the good, bad, ugly and stupidly fashionable congregate in some kind of
filthy orgy of rock, roll and barm cakes. It's like
Andy Warhol's Factory minus the cleaners and screen-printing. Whoever said it was grim up north?
This evil empire belongs to the Kaiser Chiefs. As
the hosts of Pigs, they're local legends more than capable of producing a Single Of The Week every week. Here's their first: 'Oh My God' begins all
funky, like a chilled Happy Mondays plying us with laid-back white-boy lo-fi, but then turns into
a blistering football terrace Pulp, with a psychotic chanting chorus that smacks ten shades of shit out
of most other songs that, for one terrifying moment, remind you of the Fun Lovin' Criminals.

The other two tracks are just as bamboozling
and fantastic. 'Born To Be A Dancer' is a dark take
on the Buzzcocks that's as angular as a geometry exam and gives a special mention to feeling up
girls on the National Express (hey, us ladies take what we can get, right boys?). But it's on 'Caroline, Yes' that their strongest influence comes to the
fore; it's Super Furry Animals through and through, with psychedelic swirls of noise that are too darn British to be The Beach Boys, and too darn good
to be ignored. The Kaiser Chiefs' fuzzy logic is
a sound too big for just one nightclub: watch the decks, southern scum.
Leonie Cooper

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