Off With Their Heads : Kaiser Chiefs : Review : Rolling Stone

The Kaiser Chiefs are Britain's most political pop group at the moment, although it may be hard to tell. There are no big-headline issues, no sides to take on the British band's third album. The power struggles boiling over in Andrew White's melodic-garage guitars and the chant-along choruses led by singer Ricky Wilson are mostly everyday boy-girl theater and pub-crawl routine. One song, "Can't Say What I Mean," is a hot blitz, with curdled organ and fat, crusty guitar, about being tongue-tied. The nagging hook in "Never Miss a Beat" is blissful ignorance in a nutshell: "It's cool to know nothing." Which, of course, it isn't. The Kaiser Chiefs, who hail from England's industrial north midlands, are definitely at war — with lethargy and the energy wasted on junk culture and hangover recovery — and while they are no closer to victory than they were on 2005's Employment or 2007's Yours Truly, Angry Mob, Off With Their Heads is great British pop in the dynamic lethal-irony tradition of the mid-Sixties Kinks, the early Jam and, with that vintage-New Wave tone of Nick Baines' keyboards, XTC's 1979 album, Drums and Wires. As songwriters, Wilson, White, Baines, bassist Simon Rix and drummer Nick Hodgson make kicks that last — the saucy-disco strut of "Good Days Bad Days," the brisk downhill-chords hook in "Half the Truth" — but also kick back. The deceit in "Half the Truth" seems like cartoon-spy stuff until Wilson hits the chorus, which sounds like the last eight years of Dubya ("I will not lie to you/But I definitely only gave you half the truth"). And you can hear in "Always Happens Like That," underneath the cocky Blur-via-Small Faces cheer, that cynical cycle of favor so many British bands are forced to endure: "And we made a vow/To the holy cow/And we set it up/Just to knock it down." The Kaiser Chiefs, one of the U.K.'s most popular bands right now, may get their share of lashes someday. They won't take it lying down.