It seems patently absurd to call a band who’s routinely enjoyed sold-out arena gigs in Europe (and a decade of superstardom in their native England) underrated, but damned if Kasabian isn’t just that—in the States, at least.
On this side of the pond, the band went relatively unheralded in the explosion of UK acts that recharged pop in the early ’00’s (Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand, among them), and despite the odd festival gig, they never really rose beyond cult status in the US. Our loss. Initially slagged as derivative publicity mongers, Kasabian’s honed an addictive merger of Madchester dance swirl and arena-glam swagger to epic perfection over ten years and five progressively great full-length albums (their most recent, the fab 48:13, dropped Stateside on Tuesday). With the passage of time, they’ve garnered some serious chops (and tunes) to back up their bravado.
Given their big-league status overseas, Kasabian’s performance last Saturday in the relatively intimate confines of the Showbox was a real rarity—a chance to see an arena-ready Big British Rock Band playing in a venue 1/100th the size of their usual haunts—and they did not disappoint. The Leicester quintet barreled through their 90-minute set like the arena stars they were, shoring up a sharply-chosen batch of their strongest tunes with an industrial-strength dose of rock theatricality.
The joint backbone of the band’s onstage presence has always been been frontman Tom Meighan and guitarist/singer/principal songwriter Sergio Pizzorno. Whether by accident or by design, they’re evolved into apt representations of the yin/yang of Kasabian’s sound–rock showmanship rubbing shoulders with a heady dance-music dream state. Meighan, a raffishly-handsome cross between Jude Law and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears, strutted at the center Saturday, turning his mic to the audience with pop-idol aplomb as the audience sang along, while shaggy-maned and bearded Pizzorno swayed and bobbed to the relentless dance backbeat with nigh-shambolic raver’s fervor. The rest of the band—drummer Ian Matthews, bass player Chris Edwards, and second guitarist Tim Carter—may have eschewed the overt showmanship of the two front guys, but they delivered the band’s synthesis of pulsing electro-disco and fat arena-ready riffs with snap and energy to spare.
The set cut an almost democratic swath across Kasabian’s five records, and really hammered home how many potent singles they’ve bashed out over the last decade. A stomping take on a new track, “Bumble Beee,” opened the set with a bang, and early hits “Club Foot” and “Processed Beats” received muscular runs at the set’s midway point. Best of all, the band bounded through a great rendition of their current UK hit “Eez-eh,” a slice of reptilian disco so slinkily, cheekily perfect that it deserves to be lodged on the playlist of every DJ on the planet. The capacity crowd pogoed and screamed vigorously right up to and through the three-song encore, visibly delighting Meighan and his bandmates.
Even before Kasabian impressed the hell out of me, they’d already generated a lot of respect from this corner with an imaginative hand-picked opening act. A nigh-Homeric adventure at the admission counter forced me to miss most of Japanese noise-rock band Bo Ningen’s opening set, but what I did see and hear—four whippet-thin dervishes, twirling lacquer-black locks with almost kabuki flourish and generating an unholy weld of prog-rock, metal, and My Bloody Valentine-style atmospherics—rendered me and much of the crowd speechless. It’s a measure of Kasabian’s good taste to present such an outside-the-box warmup act, and a measure of their well-placed confidence that a firestorm of an opener didn’t steal the headliners’ thunder.