REVIEW: Kasabian—Kasabian (2004)
New RSD reissue of the classic debut—finally out on 12" vinyl for the first time.
Now and then a band that you initially liked turn into something you actively despise. Oh hello Kings of Leon, I didn’t see you there! Hi Coldplay! Long time no see! Kasabian are another. 20-odd years ago, they stormed out of the traps with a hit-laden debut, announcing themselves with as assured a debut as you could wish for.
After that…well. Let’s keep it PG and say we had musical differences, and respectfully parted ways. I didn’t even have to hang around to feel bad about liking the band after Tom Meighan’s well documented assault charges in 2020. Maybe my dickhead radar was going off early on, who knows.
But art/artist and all that. It doesn’t change the fact that the Leicester outfit put out as strong a debut as any UK band managed that decade. Listening to it over 20 years later only underlines that, with a set of box fresh indie anthems for the ages.
In terms of sound, they broke free of the trad indie guitar shackles, dispensing psychedelic electronics liberally in a forward looking way that bands only typically did with the assistance of a (usually Chemical Brothers) remix—such as The Charlatans or Oasis.
This was the full banquet. Big, produced, but not overproduced. The big ones like Club Foot, L.S.F and Processed Beats suffer from being horribly overplayed, but there’s a reason for that overexposure. They’re massive, confident, in your face tunes that make people want to jump around. Proper floor-filling chart hits, the likes of which don’t really exist anymore for alternative bands.
But there’s much more to this record than the biggies. Hearing a less played-to-death track like Test Transmission or Reason Is Treason in 2025, it’s the kind of slow burn banger that would launch a career these days. What might have been. I’d pay to hear this album live end-to-end again, if I could nip in the time machine.
The problem when a new band gets put on a pedestal as the Next Big Thing is that they often try to push everything into the red. Do that but more. You can practically hear the record company rubbing their greedy corporate hands after hearing this.
Kasabian certainly did do this harder and more deliberately, and that’s where it progressively became less interesting for me. Here’s the anthem! Here’s the crowd pleaser! It all felt very contrived in that icky NME/late 00s kind of way, and you’re reminded once again why people get very tired of ‘indie’ music sometimes—usually when commercial interests blatantly take over from artistry. What we have here on the debut is the sound of the band’s original intent before the hype, ego and bullshit took over. Whatever you think of them now, go back and hear this. Forget what happened after. Nobody’s judging. And if they are, oh who cares? Like what you like.
So why am I talking about this now anyway? Well, for slightly boring reasons, the band/record company decided to persistently release this album on 10” vinyl since it came out. Now, anyone who's ever heard an album on 10” vinyl will know that it generally sounds a bit shit when you’re squishing 12-14 minutes of music onto a reduced amount of vinyl real estate. The short version is it compromises the sound quality as a result. So to finally get a 12” reissue means that this rather weighty 50 minute album has a chance to breathe and as a result sounds as good as it possibly can on the format. Hurray. It even ditches the stupid 3 minutes of silence between the final two tracks.
Why it had to be a Record Store Day release, I do not know. It’s one of those perennial sellers, so ought to just be available to people on general release like most reissues. The chances are they will eventually do that (on standard black vinyl), but evil music industry tactics try and hike up prices for RSD year-on-year, create artificial scarcity, before then making things easier to obtain later. All stupid and unnecessary, but that’s the game these days.
Anyway. Reclaim Kasabian! They really were interesting once and made an era defining album. No, really. Fight me!
