Velociraptor! is not even out, yet at the time of writing it is the bookies' 7-1 favourite to win next year's Mercury. The Leicester rock band have just added a second night at London's O2 in December after the first sold out. The feeling is growing that, having sold about 1 million copies of their Mercury-nominated last album, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Kasabian have stepped on the escalator to rock's penthouse suite.
Talking of penthouses, a recent magazine cover found the band's frontmen, singer Tom Meighan and songwriting guitarist Serge Pizzorno, book-ended by two naked women. To their credit, neither Pizzorno (wolf in thrall to the 60s) nor Meighan (excitable about Monster Munch) look entirely comfortable with the dollybird cliche, even as their music makes full use of other rock truisms. They remain a mash-up of Primal Scream, Happy Mondays and, of course, Oasis; one labouring under the delusion of being a little bit experimental.
This is a band who cannot outrun the shadow of the Gallaghers. "Man of Simple Pleasures" starts out intriguingly enough with the sound of a typewriter and a lurch of tango. These two pleasant surprises are echoed by alluring little touches elsewhere in the interstices of Velociraptor! – the gong and brass that open the album, and the meowing muezzin at the end of "Days Are Forgotten", one of the album's stronger punts overall.
Soon, though, "Man…" unravels into an Oasis singalong. It's a shame, because when Meighan croons, "For all my life/I've been taken for a fool", he momentarily abandons that toddler-on-a-football-terrace bawl that just has too much of the Liams about it to make Kasabian a stand-alone act.
The mechanics of momentum are hard to account for at the best of times. But this bet that Velociraptor! will make Kasabian a bigger act in a year's time is not one based solely on their own talents. Velociraptor! is by no means dreadful. It is named for an excellent dinosaur, and boasts an endearingly superfluous exclamation mark. It is improved in no small part by former hip-hop producer Dan the Automator, who also worked on West Ryder. Kasabian's slouching club-rock credentials have been righted somewhat by tunes such as "Switchblade Smiles", which features a farty bassline and stomping drums.
"Re-wired", meanwhile, is an out-and-out pop song with a disco beat, while "I Hear Voices" boasts 80s keyboard lines and burbling bass. Shame, then, that Meighan doesn't have the versatility to make any of these songs sexy. Too often, he just brays out Pizzorno's words.
"Simple Pleasures" aside, Kasabian sound a little less desperate to prove themselves to Oasis fans this time around. It's made them better company, and – ironically enough – it ought to result in a migration of Oasis fans for whom Beady Eye have not glittered brightly enough. Because with Oasis cleaved in two, Primal Scream in retreat and the wider field of British rock lying fallow, Kasabian are probably the only viable contenders for the top perch. They are becoming the daddies. But you wonder whether it is mostly by default.
