Kasabian: Happenings review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week

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.

Perhaps understandably, the first album Kasabian released after Meighan’s departure from the band following a 2020 conviction for domestic assault appeared to be business as usual: lairy anthems, now with Pizzorno on vocals. But on close inspection, The Alchemist’s Euphoria suggested their author was more widely read than your average purveyor of lairy anthems (the lyrics of Scriptvre appeared to quote a situationist-inspired 1971 communique issued by The Angry Brigade after their bombing of London’s Biba boutique) and more musically adventurous to boot: Rocket Fuel featured a gabba-influenced beat, twanging surf guitar and rave-y synths. It seemed to do the trick, more or less, and The Alchemist’s Euphoria became Kasabian’s sixth consecutive UK No 1 album, although its sales and streaming figures were on a noticeably smaller scale.

Happenings, however, presents listeners with a distinctive musical shift. Co-produced by Mark Ralph – best known for his work with Clean Bandit, Jax Jones and Years & Years – it occasionally feels like Pizzorno’s distortion-laden equivalent of Coldplay’s Max Martin-assisted pivot towards pop. If that’s not a comparison you suspect is going to go down terribly well with Kasabian themselves (their former frontman once described Coldplay as “alright if you’re 35 and feeling sad that your mortgage repayments have gone up”), it does seem weirdly apropos. Not merely because the sound is often noticeably more neon-hued than previously, but because there’s a distinct hint of Chris Martin about the wordless woah-oh-ing vocal hooks on Passengers and Italian Horror. Elsewhere, the house rhythm, lissom bassline and arpeggiating synths of Darkest Lullaby seem to posit Kasabian as a more grizzled English parallel to Tame Impala.

None of this should be taken as damning criticism. Pizzorno has a strong melodic grasp and a way with a knockout chorus, as demonstrated on Coming Back to Me Good: were Happenings intended as a showcase for his potential as a songwriter/producer-for-hire, you imagine mainstream pop stars would be forming an orderly queue. GOAT skilfully blends its pop inclinations with an ominous bass throb and a David Gilmour-esque guitar solo, while closer Algorithms is pretty irresistible, at least if you can get past the lyrics. In the past, Pizzorno has made a convincing case that some of Kasabian’s more apparently lunkheaded moments were written with a certain satirical intent: he claimed the oft-mocked lines that rhymed “everyone’s on bugle” with “we’re being watched by Google” on 2014’s Eez-Eh were actually a mocking portrayal of a coked-up idiot ranting at 5am. So it’ll be intriguing to see what he says about “algorithms taking control / The robots believing they have a soul”.

Related: Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno: ‘I’m not an extrovert; I’m a songwriter. Now I’m the frontman of this huge band’

Happenings is less enjoyable when it ventures into more traditional Kasabian territory. The dark-hued, bass-driven Call is spectacularly punchy and well-produced, but it’s all impressive dynamic shifts and no actual song. You can see what they’re driving at on How Far Will You Go? – which frantically amps up both the speed and the sonic scale of the motorik rhythm pioneered by Pizzorno’s beloved Neu! – yet the end result doesn’t really click. A couple of tracks – the fragmentary Hell of It and Bird in a Cage – feel like filler, which is bad news given that Happenings is only 28 minutes long.

That said, you have to admire Kasabian’s restlessness and desire to press forward: the easy thing to do would be to keep reassuring fans unsettled by the upheavals of the last four years that everything is essentially as it ever was. Happenings declines to do that, although wrapping a collection of pop-facing songs in a sleeve that – like the Angry Brigade-indebted lyrics of Scriptvre – suggests Pizzorno has been burying himself in the grimier end of the late 60s/early 70s underground press is a characteristically oddball move. What the beer-chuckers will make of it remains to be seen.

This week Alexis listened to

Michael Kiwanuka – Floating Parade
Debuted at Glastonbury and worth searching iPlayer for : a blissful, drifting summer breeze of a song.