Boring, corporate, imitative, inane and gutless: Kasabian’s Happenings reviewed

Happenings were interesting, or irritating, events staged from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s by performers who eschewed the corporate and bourgeois restraints placed on artists and veered into surrealism, parody, violence and, of course, situationism. Think Allan Kaprow and John Cage. In rock music, meanwhile, think the Fugs and the Pink Fairies.

Happenings by our country’s most profitable faux-rawk outfit, Leicester’s Kasabian, is by contrast a celebration of everything happenings were most opposed to. It is boring, corporate, imitative, inane and gutless. I would almost rather listen to an album by Dua Lipa.

It is 20 years since Kasabian’s first album and they have got no more interesting or challenging, but the cash flows in regardless. Most of the songs here are basically stock, anodyne EDM given a bit of Bon Jovi beef and odious bolted-on bombast in the chorus. Arena rock does not become more beguiling when the hackneyed fripperies of rap and EDM – the tribal ‘oh oh oh ohs’ in choruses, the repetition and so on – are appended. They just make you hate it more.

Nothing here betrays the vaguest inventiveness: not the melodies, not the arrangements – and certainly not the lyrics. There are two songs which might make the firing squad pause for a second before pulling their triggers: ‘Coming Back to Me Good’ and ‘Algorithms’, the latter of which I fear they believe is anthemic. The band are like U2, except without even that slender talent. Cage thought we had become too dependent upon the formulaic. But at least he never had to hear Kasabian.

Music for bricklayers, as Ian McCulloch once said of U2. Such snobbery. So right.