Kaiser Chiefs: Live at Alexandra Palace, London
It’s packed and sweaty, and drunken indie-kids are spewing. Who said the Kaisers weren’t rock and roll?
For the ’Chiefs, this evening the pressure is off. All this crowd want is to pogo like hyperactive six year olds and ‘na-na-na’ outlandishly to the hits that have been on their iTunes for the past two years. This is high-energy unpretentious fun on a big fat stick.
The evening kicks off with the ultimate ode to relationship-carnage: ‘Every Day I Love You Less and Less’, and continues to rumble through the choon-happy album Employment. Wilson is every inch the showman, riding a high-wire cable across the auditorium to perform a few hits to the rear end of the crowd. And just to keep the laydees happy, every now and then the pace is taken down a notch, at best with the dreamy ‘You Can Have It All’.
But what the beady eye and greedy ear really want this evening is a taste of things to come. The few new tracks thrown in are mostly in the same vein as their first album: bleepy flippant musical mayhem. But as seems to have been the Kaiser Chiefs’ general ethos thus far, if the formula for good music ain’t broke, then don’t try to be a clever sod and fix it.
Reviewed by Jenni Marsh
22/04/06
