Hitting the snooze…

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[3.50]

Thomas Inskeep: It’s like Muse trying to sound like the Bay City Rollers. Prog-disco?
[2]

Alfred Soto: Weren’t their songs faster ten years ago?
[3]

David Sheffieck: “That was then but this is now/And what’s really changed” just begs to be made a lame punchline, but the fact is that it obscures the truth: “Ruby” may have been maddeningly omnipresent in my college radio days, but it at least had a solid hook. The Kaiser Chiefs of 2015 just have an anemic synth line and thinner, hoarser vocals. As changes go, that’s not the best kind to make. But apparently it’s an easy one to miss.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: As a late-career move, settling down as a festival band is not a bad choice. And for a band such as Kaiser Chiefs, whose high points have always been designed to be screamed back at them by a blob of humanity, it’s a natural move. Still, might be a good idea to make “Falling Awake” actually fun to sing along with.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: What the Kaiser Chiefs perceive as a brave (by their standards) step into electronic pop touches is actually a not brave and quite pathetic revival of early 2000s British boy band sounds. Yes, stand up Phixx, your critical rehabilitation starts here. Only this is about one-fifth the tune Phixx’s “Hold On Me” was.
[3]

Micha Cavaseno: I like how a decade later, these hacks now sound like some of the other bands from a decade ago. This is pretty much a terrible Rooney song playing on *NAME REDACTED*’s myspace while I try to impress them with the bare vestiges of my humor while I wonder if its worth it to read Chuck Palahniuk (never made the jump, thank goodness). The trick is, it isn’t worth it, same way as it wasn’t worth this song being made.
[3]

Brad Shoup: “Falling” is the hack’s verb choice. Does “falling awake” mean he’s waking up? Or that he’s falling, but at least he’s aware he’s doing so? Seventy-eight repetitions of the phrase bring me no closer to an answer. But this is a band that chooses to foreground the crap spooky synth hook and banish the boring rhythm guitar to the background for contrast, so maybe there’s nought to be found.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Who says going on The Voice is a fool’s errand? (Don’t answer that.) Making the case for the defence is Ricky Wilson, sneakily reemerging like a mini Lazarus, in time for a lot of people not to have realised he’d gone. Bearing panicky synths, this is possibly the most electrocentric Kaiser Chiefs single to date, and with the repetition, possibly the most hook-reliant. With the occasionally outright objectionable “commentary” given a swerve, all eggs are in one basket, but the resulting disoriented lament works.
[7]