Hadouken! - Music for an Accelerated Culture (Album)
If The Prodigy were to have a love child with Bloc Party with the lyrical attitude of Arctic Monkeys and an acid problem, then you have sporned, Hadouken!
And the exclamation mark is well warranted. Their debut album, Music for an Accelerated Culture is a cacophony of red-cordial induced sounds inspired by the new experiences of clubbing. Sort of like if your eighteen year old brtoher had a major record deal and a basic knowledge of Garage Band.
Drink. Smoke. Fight. Fuck. Not only the chorus from the track, Liquid Lives, but also, the basic tenet of Hadouken! and their crazed spasms of msuic which have become massive clubber hits.
They have taken the myspace style made famous by the Arctic Monkeys and shelved it with a metaphorical ecstasy tablets.
The raspy, Cockney vocals of vocalist, James Smith, are met with mad distortion and crazed timing. Combined with samples that sound like the music from the pokies and agitated and somewhat arrogant, if not tongue-in-cheek vocals about lust, parties and getting loaded, Hadouken! are an acquired taste, and possibly only appeal to the age group which they so obviously belong to.
Get Smashed, Gate Crash is a party hit for a Corey Worhtington shindig, (Getting laid on the parent’s bed/Drinking the alcohol cabinet clean), right down to the ultimate choral warning: “Welcome to our world/We are the wasted youth and we are the future…”
This romanticised detailing of getting off chops will no doubt appeal to the Gen Y’ers that this album was produced for (oh sorry, I mean the “accelerated culture”).
Fast-paced and hectic electro club anthems for the “wasted youth” riddled with past inklings of their ADHD will have this album on constant rotation.
Listening to the musical advice to Crank it Up (which pays homage to product placement with big name-drops throughout), as is emphatically suggested, no doubt parents will be banging on doors insisting on turning down that terrible racket escaping from their ITunes library.
And seeing as this is one of the biggest markets in the music industry, no doubt these guys will live to hit another club…and then go home and write about it in the wee hours of the morning, thinking that they’ve hit a nerve in modern culture.
After all, the word hadouken does mean “surged fist”, which is pretty much the image conjured up in my head of how people are meant to react to this band. I just didn’t.
Or maybe it just makes me feel bloody old and uncool – so Live long and prosper boys – drink, smoke, fight, fuck!
