Kaiser Chiefs - Yours Truly, Angry Mob

On their debut album, Employment, Kaiser Chiefs combined infantile fun (crowd-pleasing crescendos and dumb na-na-na-na-nahs) with a sniper-like lyrical wit. At a time when Bloc Party were jerking, Kasabian swaggering and The Killers hamming, Kaiser Chiefs were prancing dandily around the lairy chavs and flying beer bottes of the local town centre like the outsider boho types they were. And because they seemed to come from nowhere (if you were too young to remember the first wave of Britpop), three million kids identified with their energetic paeans to a broken Blighty and duly parted with their tenners.

The trouble is, now the Kaisers aren't just your likeable trilby-wearing tykes-next-door; they are a multi million-selling outfit, and whimsical observations of binge-drinking hoodies accompanied by on-stage pogo-jumps isn't a long-term guarantee of success. So have the Kaisers, now pushing 30, finally grown up on Yours Truly, Angry Mob?

Song titles like Everything is Average Nowadays and Retirement suggest they have, but elsewhere there remains the tales of nightclubs and fisticuffs: 'You raise a glass or two/ You raise a fist or two/ And get a shopping basket wrapped round your head' - from The Angry Mob, which stands out as their most accomplished song to date. The price of fame is lamented on Thank You Very Much, in which singer Ricky Wilson has the wearisome task of meeting a fan backstage: 'This should be a thrill but it feels like a drill'. The poor sod. Other songs like Heat Dies Down and Highroyds find the Kaisers on familiar, high-tempo musical turf, partly due to the re-employment of Employment producer Stephen Street.

Yours Truly is an undeniably solid album, revealing the band's growing confidence in writing short, punchy British pop songs that echo Supergrass, Blur and early Beatles. Wilson has mercifully capped the na-na-nahs, but there are no signs of this band growing old gracefully. [Nick Mitchell]