The next 12 months really aren’t looking good for Kaiser Chiefs’ detractors. The Bash Street Britpop of Never Miss a Beat is already all over the airwaves – simultaneously satirising and applauding “the kids on the street” who eat crisps for tea and go to school merely because they have to. And even if the kids on your street aren’t nearly so loveable, there’s still plenty more where that came from.

Perhaps mindful of people’s expectations, the producer Mark Ronson and his charges have been careful to reconnect with the adrenalised puppy-power of their 2005 debut, Employment. The string-garnished Like It Too Much is as sophisticated as Off With Their Heads gets. Which is about right, because fundamentally the quintet’s strengths hark back to those of 1970s New Wavers – the Stranglers, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Magazine – who married punk exuberance to whip-smart musicality. Binding them further to those bands is the queasy fairground organ of Nick “Peanut” Baines, which doubles the voltage of Can’t Say What I Mean and Spanish Metal.

Good Days Bad Days and Tomato in the Rain comprise a pleasingly melancholy intermission of rainy-day chords. But Kaiser Chiefs can’t even have a long, dark night of the soul without offering nibbles and light refreshments. Hence when Wilson sings, “Like a tomato in the rain/ I got that feeling again,” he still sounds like the loveable protagonist in his own West End musical.

In a recent interview, Wilson complained that a review of Off With Their Heads read like a five but adjudged it a four. Then, in an act of almost heroic small-mindedness, he grabbed the offending magazine and shaded in the fifth star himself. So have Kaiser Chiefs come through with a work of such clock-stopping perfection that 2008 will forever be associated with it?

Well, not with by-numbers Kaiserpop tunes such as Addicted to Drugs and Half the Truth bulking out the track listing. But even those songs remind us that, elsewhere, Kaiser Chiefs make it look far easier than it is. And that’s the point. They may be incapable of suffering for their art, but it doesn’t become us to hold it against them.

(B Unique, TMS £12.99, call 0845 6026328)

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