West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum

For their third album, and the first since the departure of guitarist/keyboardist/songwriter Chris Karloff, Kasabian fulfills the promise hinted at in brief flashes on their preceding release, Empire, and finally casts off the Madchester tag for good. If you found the band’s initial salvo hard to cozy up to, with its in-your-face laddishness and not-so-subtle blend of Stone Roses and Fatboy Slim -- not to mention that group name inspired by a member of Charlie Manson’s crew -- you’ll find a kinder, gentler, and somewhat more stoned-sounding Kasabian on (sharp intake of breath) West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. While they’re far from unrecognizable as the Kasabian of old -- there’s still a fair share of club-friendly beats and anthemic rock choruses -- the lads from Leicester have let the dashes of ‘60s influence that peeked through on their previous records blossom in full psychedelic technicolor on a number of tracks here. Guitars get wah-wah’ed and fuzzed, keyboards swirl around in a trippy, ethereal fashion, tempos shift, string orchestrations wander into strange tonal spaces, and the whole feel of the album’s second half is decidedly “groovy” in the old-school sense of the word. One track even opens with a spoken excerpt from French experimental film Sans Soleil that goes on about “emus in the zone.” And that’s not even mentioning the elevated “Wow, dude...” factor of that willfully obscurantist album title.