Hadouken! - 'Music For An Accelerated Culture' (Atlantic) Released 05/05/2008

Come along mate, you gotta cheer up! Hadouken! ’av got this new album out. They’ve only gone and called it ‘Music For An Accelerated Culture’ so it’s like that Prodigy record (‘Music For A Jilted Generation’). Yea, the one by the guy who smacked his bitch up. Yea, well his time is up my friend, coz these guys are coming for this sound, and they got more bars than JD Wetherspoons. Really, they ‘av. Open the CD, the music swells out; It’s quite catchy, if you can tell. Let’s get this party started then…

They’ve got nuffin left to lose after their mixtape was slammed; they’ve been around, and they’ve seen this place before so they know these music journo’s ways. This time, they’re not gonna waste it, y’know? So they’ve put like massive effort into this album. And it’s all these monumental rave melodies that screech and scrunch and will fuck up your head like crystal meth.

Let’s separate the shit. Manslaughter James should be convicted, for the pain inflicted on ‘Driving Nowhere’. Must’ve been the small print I misunderstood, coz I fought he said “She filled up his tank for a trip on the dual carriageway”. All bad fings must come to an end. Come the fuck along Hadouken! This is shit. Thank fuckully, the rest of the album is a whole load better.

In usual Hadouken! fashion, they’re still attacking "Hoxton heroes" and "indie sindys" on ‘That Boy, That Girl’, telling us we look silly when we put on our best myspace pout. But this time they’re imploring the emoes to dry their eyeliner, coz their time has been, yeah fuck their precious scene! Hadouken! are coming for them. And they’ve created a new scene, a dance scene, a rave scene. And those fluro nu-rave hoddies you like so much will not be looking out of place.

Their infectious electronic dance enthused bass lines will blow the speaker. It doesn’t matter if some girl’s gone and dumped ya again, go out, get smashed and gate crash, be sick on the landing, pass out in the upstairs toilet, smoke up in the outside shed, get laid on the parent’s bed. This music is the perfect soundtrack. You might well have damaged your brain but next week you’ll be at it again.

Hadouken! is a band that represents such hedonistic nihilism very well. They probably go out every night (Shoreditch perhaps?), piss away a few bob, drink and scream and shag, But it’s ok, coz that’s the yoof of today. You don’t care what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter when the parent’s come back, coz they’ll still be screwing. Tracks like ‘Get Smashed, Gate Crash’ and ‘Liquid Lives’ stink of such teenage normalcy. Good news for social comment, but bad news for middle England (we currently await the Daily Hysteria headlines).

Other songs like ‘Mister Misfortune’, ‘What She Did’ and ‘Wait For You’ show a softer side to James Smith’s narratives. He might well be an indie limey, who likes it grimey. But, he’s not afraid to sing about sitting outside his ex girlfriend’s house in his maxed up Vauxhall Nova, with the hand brake on. He might well watch her from the car, “where’s she gone with her bedroom light on?” In true Hadouken! fashion, it hasn’t all gone wrong, coz they’ve walked the fuck along; digressing in a multitude of directions to give the album a bit of scope. Just as it veers off, they stick another (often older) track on to move it along.

Here at Gigwise, we’re not too cool for the next big thing, and neither should you be! Hadouken! own this game like a kid with a new Playstation. You’ll soon be converting this track to MP3 and giving it four stars in your itunes library; setting it as your profile song to show the hipsters you first support this one. They may be the wasted youth, but welcome to their world. It’s great, innit?! Just get that motorway song off the album, and you’re onto a winner!