Date: Sunday Mar. 25, 2012 4:32 PM PT

Back in the U.K., their home country, Kaiser Chiefs routinely play arenas. When it comes to their hometown, Leeds, they've even played to 35,000 worshiping fans at the local soccer stadium. This made last night's concert in the cosy confines of Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom an up close and personal chance for Anglophile indie rock fans of the Lower Mainland to see one of the biggest British bands of the past decade.

Certainly an affection for, or at least an understanding of British culture, appears to be a prerequisite for Kaiser Chiefs' fandom. Unlike universally accessible artists like Coldplay or Adele, the Chiefs' songs are set in a particular English urban landscape where "tea" is a meal and "lairy" is a state of mind.

Whether Kaiser Chiefs' lyrical nuances were clear to everyone, it appeared that the vast majority of last night's crowd (a fair proportion of whom welcomed the band by wearing either Whitecaps, Manchester United or Leeds United soccer shirts) had a reasonable grasp of what singer Ricky Wilson was banging on about, as he led his band through a 16-song set that tested the very limits of the Commodore's famously springy floorboards.

It would come as no surprise if the band insisted on playing the Commodore on the basis of floor quality alone. Eight years since their rise to prominence, they remain Britain's bounciest band, carving out choruses that practically beg audiences to take to the sky while singing their lungs out.

Of course, this is rarely subtle. The band kicked off its set with "Every Day I Love You Less and Less" and "Never Miss a Beat," two high-velocity pop bullets aimed directly at the dance floor. On the radio, they're quirky, amiable bursts of indie pop. Through the Commodore's massive speaker cabinets, they were instant anthems, practically begging the crowd to leap into a gently good-tempered moshpit.

The chief cheerleader throughout was Wilson, who delivered a high-energy performance utterly lacking in self-restraint or pretension. By the time the band delivered "Everything is Average Nowadays" four songs in, Wilson was climbing and singing from on top of the security barriers. He leapt from the stage at the beginning of "Kinda Girl You Are" and ran around the venue to one of the Commodore's four bars, at which point he jumped onto the counter, ordered a shot of Bushmills and downed it in one.

"We are the Kaiser Chiefs!" he bellowed into his mic as the rest of the band watched for his next move from the stage. "We have been sent here to entertain you! We will not rest until you are entertained!"

This is Kaiser Chiefs' simple ethos. They're not political. They're not intellectual. They simply deliver a relentless stream of what the British like to call Terrace Anthems, songs that get lodged in the brain and can be sung back at high volume by large groups at the slightest provocation. That's exactly what songs like "Ruby," "Na Na Na Na Na" and "I Predict a Riot" (gratefully introduced without any reference to Vancouver's recent embarrassment) are designed to produce. And that's exactly what happened.

The ultimate bouncefest was saved until last with "Oh My God" sending the crowd into the Granville Street night sweaty and smiling. Not all of them would have picked up all the band's lyrical references, but no one appeared to be complaining.

Continued here:
Kaiser Chiefs get up close and personal in Vancouver