If you’re Tom Meighan or Serge Pizzorno, the temptation to keep kicking people into submission with your Club Foot must be huge. Got to write a new album? Just knock out a couple of crowd-pleasing rebadged ‘Fire’s; consolidate your arena status, keep picking up the cheques. Of course, Kasabian aren’t the sort of band to shy away from a challenge (lest we forget that hairstyle revivalist Meighan tried to resuscitate the shoulder-length curtain do last time out; a valiant effort, even if it was the haircut equivalent of a suicide mission). While their last album, ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’, was named for a mental hospital, their latest, ‘Velociraptor!’, is positively schizophrenic, packed to its groaning gills with a multiplicity of ideas; some good, some terrible, some downright ridiculous. But then that’s sort of the point. You see, ‘Velociraptor!’’s brilliance lies in the fact that it is – as any album that starts with the cinematic crash of a giant gong and contains the line “They hunt for rabbits, just like Yosemite Sam” should be – perfectly aware of its own preposterousness. ‘Let’s Roll Just Like We Used To’ – the chic monochrome opener – sports a chorus draped in drama-heightening, pulse-quickening strings, while ‘Goodbye Kiss’ – stepping even further away from the Kasabian we’re used to – is almost circumspect; a forlorn Tom crooning for a lost love while ruefully reflecting, “Rock’n’roll has turned us insane”. Even when they deliver a blatant pastiche – as with the deeply ‘Sgt. Pepper’s…’ indebted ‘La Fée Verte’ – it’s legitimised by a suave lyrical brushoff in the very first line, “I see Lucy in the Sky, telling me I’m high.” Smart? It’s like watching Miles Kane pluck a wayward thread from his lapel. Of course, being Kasabian, it’s not all dry vermouth and pitted olives. There are some incendiary moments reminiscent of the band we know and fuzz plastic cups at, too: ‘Switchblade Smile’’s face-wobbling bass is destined to reverberate round the guts of grotty indie clubs the land over, while ‘Velociraptor!’ has a chorus that you can easily – and beerily – bawl along to without bothering to learn the words. Then there’s ‘Neon Noon’ and ‘Acid Turkish Bath (Shelter From The Storm)’ the former an urgent, surging Kraftwerk homage, the latter a dramatic sprawl of strings aimed squarely and unabashedly at the grandeur of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’. True, it’s far from perfection, but ‘Velociraptor!’ is an exercise in extravagance; and a hugely enjoyable one at that. If only more big bands would try so hard to upscale.

JJ Dunning