Kasabian: Happenings review | Alexis Petridis’s album of

(Sony Music)
The lad-favourites shift into neon hues on their second Serge Pizzorno-led album, as knockout choruses face off against some disappointing filler

Losing a lead singer is always going to be a tough hurdle for a band to overcome, but it seemed particularly difficult in Kasabian’s case. As has often been pointed out, they were always a far weirder band than their laddish following might have led you to believe. At the height of their fame, they were to be found playing Wembley Arena in front of a crowd of beer-chucking, occasionally belligerent geezers, on a stage set featuring a vast mock-up of a copy of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story collection Labyrinths, with the stage-side screens flashing up quotations from French playwright Antonin Artaud.

And something of this dichotomy at the heart of the band seemed to be embodied in the relationship between their bullish vocalist Tom Meighan and the noticeably more softly spoken guitarist and songwriter Serge Pizzorno. The former was a frontman very much in the vein of Liam Gallagher, who was selected to unveil the new England strip on stage in 2010, the latter was given to quoting Charles Bukowski and enthusing in interviews about electronic duo Silver Apples and nouvelle vague director Chris Marker’s experimental essay-film Sans Soleil.