Hadouken!: Music For An Accelerated Culture
Monday, 05 May 2008 16:12
Hadouken!: Music For An Accelerated Culture
Surface Noise/Atlantic, out now.
In a nutshell...
Frantic, genre-vaulting, hit and miss, ASBO disco!
Who's it by?
Hadouken! (so named after the famous fireball attack move in the legendary 1990s game Street Fighter) are a five-piece band who formed in 2006 while at university together in Leeds. It wasn't long before they gained a dedicated following on the live music circuit and played their first London gig in September of the same year at the renowned Proud Gallery in Camden.
Yet despite hailing from the north of England, the trendy inner-city areas of Hoxton and Shoreditch are where Hadouken! are most likely to be received. As the album title suggests, Music For An Accelerated Culture is not your everyday album filled with tracks to entertain mainstream airwaves – oh no. With its name borrowed from the subtitle of Douglas Coupland’s seminal novel Generation X, this album can accurately be described as a 30 minute, 11-track journey through a scope of different genres, from indie to new rave and grime to big beat – the result is a fusion of sounds that some marketing types have suggested we now call 'grindie'. The jury is out on that one!
To receive this album in CD format is something of a rarity where this band are concerned. Keeping in line with their futuristic branding, the record company bods ensured that Hadouken! were the first UK act to release an EP on a USB-only basis, as was the case with their 2007 Mix tape. Add to that a number of Guerrilla video premieres, the announcement of own summer festival and the formation of their own online community and you really do get the impression that if there was a 'grindie' march sometime in the future, Hadouken! would be at the front – shouting through a futuristic megaphone!
As an example...
"That boys a Hoxton hero/Skinny fit jeans and dressed in pink/How he dresses I care zero/As long as he don't steal my drink/That girls an indie Cindy/Lego haircut and polka-dot dress/I don't care if she thinks she's indie/How she's different is anyone's guess." - That Boy That Girl
"Listen, I got a bit of fiscal trouble/I don't want to sob but I need a few bob/In the last year I've seen my debt double/And I can't pay it back because I ain't got a job/Isn't it funny how people live a life of debt/ o one person, that they have never met." - Spend Your Life
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
Unless the American mainstream music scene undergoes a revolution the likes of which not seen since the 1960s, then no, a widespread nod to the UK New Rave-grime-grindie or whatever you want to call it scene won't be happening anytime in the near future.
What the others say
"Even if the Hoxton heroes and indie Cindies have moved on, there are plenty of people who could live by this. People accelerate at different speeds. While their MySpace and ringtone reference points are rooted to the minute they first wrote them, Hadouken!'s "Drink! Smoke! F**k! Fight!" message is timeless." - NME
"Music for an Accelerated Culture couldn't be more zeitgeisty if it tried. The existential elegance of Declaration of War and the Bowie-via-Kasabian stomp of Mister Misfortune show an unexpected versatility, and Driving Nowhere is oddly romantic, and dare I say, even new romantic." - Independent
So is it any good?
Music For An Accelerated Culture is a piece of work that is somewhat hit and miss from start to finish. When it's good it's very good. However, it will not be to everyone's taste and you do feel there are several fillers and on an album that is just barely over half an hour in length, there is little place for stop-gap tracks.
The stand out attribute of this album is undoubtedly its lyrical content – witty, sharp-tongued and socially-aware verses are present throughout the album, and no more prevalent than the standout track That Boy That Girl where the group mischievously poke fun at the hoards of indie kids who make a point of shaping their image away from mainstream society, only to converge into one group where everyone looks the same anyway. Ironically, it is this exact demographic that forms the core of the Hadouken! fan base – but that's another article entirely!
As has been the case with so many UK albums in recent years, this one deals with many of the issues the youth of today faces - binge drinking, youth culture, the commercial appropriation of underground music, relationships and debt.
The worry with this, on a lyrical level at least, is that following several years of acts like the Streets, Arctic Monkeys and more recently Plan B and Jamie T writing about everyday youth life, many of the stories will have already been told. But the opening lines on the first track Get Smashed Gate Crash tell the listener that this album is something different from the outset – "Welcome to our world/We are the wasted youth /And we are the future".
You name it and Hadouken! tell it, and tell it well with their own unique 2008 twist. Lead singer and chief song-scribbler James Smith recently commented: "After we'd written the album we were looking for a unifying link between the tracks and it became clear they were all separate stories and that a lot of them had a morality to them."
There are also a number of other stand out tracks on the album, where some of James Smith and co’'s musical influences are clearly evident. The big break influenced beats and funky vocals of Game Over (that also includes the quite brilliant lyric "We've got more bars than JD Wetherspoon") are reminiscent of some of the more up-tempo Chemical Brothers material, while the exceptional What She Did would sit comfortably on any of the early Prodigy albums.
However, the new Prodigy Hadouken! are not (as some of the over-excited followers may have you believe), and while their now signature futuristic sounds are refreshing and well worth a listen, the longevity of the album is questionable and it is unlikely to get much of an airing beyond the bars of Hoxton Square come this time next year.
One afterthought though, if you are to judge Hadouken! as a band, make sure you go to see them live first. A ‘'grimey' underground nightclub is where this band truly comes to life and listening to this album just once that fact will become abundantly clear.
7/10
Jamie Reid
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