“Kaiser Chiefs sound their most comfortable, and perform to their absolute best when they’re beating out some speedy pop-friendly, Mod-indebted rock that will get the frat boys chanting along down at the pub. “I Predict a Riot” and “Ruby” may not be classics in the eyes of most critics, but anyone who’s gone to college sometime before or after their immediate release will say that Employment (and to a much lesser extent, the follow up Yours Truly, Angry Mob) is a fine album for its times. While the album may not have matured in any way, the band wants to give you the impression than they have, and that seems to be the frame of mind in which most of Start the Revolution Without Me seems to be in. The result is a messy pastiche of psych-leaning nu-new wave tunes, that merely hint that these songs may have started as nuggets that the band would have been fine with seven years ago, but now seem obsolete when compared to the kind of material that most bands are releasing nowadays.

Start the Revolution Without Me would have been interesting a few years ago, due to it’s much ballyhooed releasing schedule, in which they let fans listen to about 20 tracks recorded on their website, then vote on which 10 deserve to be on the album. The results of which were released last year in the U.K. as The Future is Medieval, with four different songs than the set released in America. Either way, it should, logically speaking, be a fan’s album, and sales may prove that to be the case, if there are any die-hard Kaiser Chief fans left in America to put them back on the map. […]”

Check out the full review of Start the Revolution Without Me by David Williams at TheMusic.FM.

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