:: Hadouken! - Music For An Accelerated Culture

Hadouken!

There’s just something about this album that makes it feel like a guilty pleasure. You love it but you feel wrong for doing so. Over the years a number of groups have tried to capture that crossover between hardcore dance and rap. Groups such as Fast Crew have had relative success with it but nobody seems to have done it as well as English lads, Hadouken! have. If you haven’t already heard these guys than you must give ‘Music For An Accelerated Culture’ a listen… this is the best the genre has to offer. ‘Get Smashed Gate Crash’ sets the scene for Hadouken! It’s hardcore dance music like you would find on any Ministry Of Sound Compilation and over the top of that are some of the fastest performed lyrics you are ever likely to hear. Fast but still melodic. Tracks like ‘That Boy That Girl’ rely heavily on the 90s style dance music… a kind of sped up Chemical Brothers sound; while ‘Game Over’ is catchy enough to be heard on every Ibiza beach this summer. By far the best track on ‘Music For An Accelerated Culture’ is ‘Declaration Of War’ which sees Hadouken! reveal a more modern sounding dance beat. This is closely followed by Hadouken!’s version of a ballad with ‘Driving Nowhere’ and ‘Wait For You’; they are the guilt pleasures because you want to listen to them over and over. The album falls a little flat with ‘Mr Misfortune’ (which manages to out cheese The Streets) and ‘Spend You Life’ (on which they forget about dance and focus on rap… doesn’t work), but they is soon corrected about the harsh sounding ‘Crank It Up’ which is just begging to be used on an action film soundtrack. ‘Liquid Lives’ is dance music at its most manic… how does the lead singer ever keep up this pace? It will be amazing to see these guys live. Like all guilty pleasure you’ll deny liking ‘Music For An Accelerated Culture’ to all your friends, but deep down you’ll know you really do.