KAISER CHIEFS- EMPLOYMENT reviewed by guest reviewer Tim

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If ever there was a one track album this is it. The single "I predict a riot" which gets the highest praise possible from its initial reviewer in that it sounds like The Clash, is a great track harking back to the better days of late seventies early eighties and such wonders as the vapours, sham 69 and indeed the greatest of them all the aforementioned Clash. Imagine then, as someone who maintains that great rock albums of the last twenty years can be counted on the fingers of one hand, my optimism when I first heard the "riot" track and prepared myself, while queuing up the album, to require a second hand. The all too familiar sinking feeling soon overwhelmed me as track after barely listenable track blighted my long drive home. It is a sad fact of today`s artistic malaise that all too often when a standout track, Embrace`s "Gravity", Morrisey`s "First of the gang to die" for example heralds only the bitter disappointment of 9 other tracks of substandard and instantly forgettable filler. The kids will always need new bands to call their own, to blazen on their T-shirs and to scribble on their college bags but one of the great pleasures of growing up is the realisation that IT REALLY WAS better then and that its ok to point at the emperor`s new clothes and expose such mediocre output as just that, the best of a very bad bunch which in more creative times would have been consigned to the garages of suburbia forever.

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Room With A Review thanks Tim very much for taking the time to contribute to our site