I'm just a simple medical student at Sheffield University, and I joined Ciao to express my opinion t...
I'm just a simple medical student at Sheffield University, and I joined Ciao to express my opinion through surveys, and hopefully make a bit of cash too! Now I've met with the review writing, I'm getting so much more out of it, and really enjoying it!
Member since:16.05.2005
Reviews:17
Members who trust:2
Hard-Fi are a group of four lads from Stains, and have just recently had their debut LP nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. If they win it, they'll be awarded £20,000 - more than 20 times the cost that this album (expanded from a self-financed EP produced earlier in the year) cost them to make!
This album reflects life is a boring suburbia, living within the prison wall of the M25, these are the products of Tony Blair's campaign for respect, his constant help of the middle classes. All the most important acts of recent times have fed off the political climate of the day, and this is no exception. It's a gritty peek at suburban England, with Stains in mind, but it could just as easily be about any shi**y satellite town in the UK.
First track, Cash Machine, is about how everything that can go wrong does so. All cash machines set to empty, and your girlfriend's pregnancy test set to blue. "Go to a cash machine/to get a ticket home/a message on the screen/say don't make plans you're broke", the call from the working classes on minimum wage, slogging their guts out for little or no reward, in capable of getting anything. The backing on synth and something that sounds like a harmonica, quite haunting, is perfect for this song.
Track 2, Middle Eastern Holiday, about what those hard-up youths do when the cash machine says no - take a trip to Iraq for Tony and his new right-wing Labour Party. Every lyric is fantastic, perfectly capturing the opinion of the war, but particularly poignant
are "Going on my Middle Eastern holiday/give me a gun, hope I see my mum again" and "Back at home, politicians sit/over lunch discussing this/in the desert the fuse is lit/I'm the one who had to deal with it". The guitars are relatively heavy, and the song is very much drum-driven, leading to a sense of euphoria, but because of the lyrics, you feel uncomfortable in enjoying this song.
Tied up too Tight is track 3, starting much slower in pace than the end of Middle Eastern holiday, with a beautiful piano intro, but about a minute and 15 seconds in, the guitars pick up, and this becomes a dance song. At the end, the guitar solos kick in heavy, and the riff is fantastic throughout. This is about escaping the M25, but still feeling tied to London and its satellites, and the desperation in the vocals is palpable.
Track 4, Gotta Reason, and track 5, Hard to Beat, are straight up love songs. The former about meeting a new girl, and suddenly your life has reason, and you can now see a point in getting up in the morning. This is still tinged with their typical cynicism and realisation of how sad it is that it takes a woman to give life meaning. Here we have another dance song, the guitar riff reminiscent of Hot Hot Heat. The latter is these songs, the single which made them big, has a beautiful riff behind it, and is about meeting a beautiful girl in a club, and then leaving with her. Again, it seems every so slightly self-deprecating, and almost childish, using the word "love" quite early.
Unnecessary Trouble is Hard-Fi's fight song, "just make sure you cause trouble when it's necessary". The dirty, lingering guitar chords in the background giving way to a screaming guitar at the end, and leading, by way of an almost choral "woah-oh" into track 7, Move on Now, the get-away song. A beautiful piano, more Nick Drake than Keane, with just a touch of synth, and Richard's cathartic vocals leading the way, looking at the planes flying overhead, wondering where they're going, and wishing he was there - anywhere but here. This is a massive surprise on this usually driving album, and one of the high points.
Better do Better is a big f*ck off to his (presumably ex-) girlfriend. The chorus; "You think I'm gonna take you back?/You'd better do better than that/I'll tell you how it's gonna be/don't you ever ever come near me", something most of us are familiar with. It's about a girl who left him for another guy, and now she's been kicked out, she wants him back. It's harsh, ugly and dirty, but will mean something to all of us, it's edgy guitars and angry vocals serve to stir up the emotion.
Feltham is Singing Out follows, and employs a rather bizarre choir! The lyrics start off being about wanting to go out and have fun every night of the week, as often as you can, and get drunk and high on everything going, but the second verse is darker, more about having to sell your possessions and cutting off the utilities to keep the loan shark off your back, and eventually turning to crime, from you family and friends, and then from local shops, until you get caught, and go to jail. Darker still as we delve into the third verse, where now we're stuck in jail. You can't take it, so you hang yourself. The guitars here are jagged and angular, quite uncomfortable to listen to. The storyteller then goes on to reminisce about you in jail, and how hard it must be for you to live in that hell. This is probably the least comfortable track on the album.
Living for the weekend is reminiscent of Kinesis' "A Generation devoid of Inspiration" from their Handshakes for Bullets LP. It's about working all week in a job you hate, just because you know that at the end of the week, when all the pressure's gone, you can go and cut loose with you mates, and it'll not matter. You're so determined to get into a place, you'll break in, just to let your hair down. It's a fast-paced high-adrenaline song, making you want to dance, although the style of singing make you want to start a fight whilst you're at it!
The last track of the album, and the title track, Stars of CCTV, is self-explanatory really. A perfect choice to end the album, due in part to it contrast with Living for the weekend (this has a much slower tempo), but also by carrying on the theme of the whole album. It about how we're constantly being watched, dressing up for the government, and holding up shops for the sake of fame. Like many other songs on this album, it sounds beautiful superficially, but once heard a few times, the true meaning comes through, and it's quite difficult to sit through.
This album is, in my opinion, the best of the year so far, and had I any say, it'd win Mercury by a mile. You can probably tell just how much I loved this by the volume I've written, but please, if you've read this, buy it! Everyone need to own this album, it's the "Definitely Maybe" for the ASBO generation!
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Jul 23rd, 2005
exceptional by (7%):
very helpful by (93%):
![River Is Wide, The [Remastered] - Forum (The)](http://imagesb.ciao.com/iuk/images/products/small/251/prod_small-6006251.jpg)
