Music for an Accelerated Culture

Album Review

Imagine a cross between the Prodigy and 2 Unlimited (yes, it is possible), and Hadouken! are the band that achieved that unlikely pairing on their debut full-length album, Music for an Accelerated Culture. Track three was titled "Game Over" and computer gaming featured high on Hadouken!'s list of influences, even down to their name, which reportedly came from a specific fighting attack move in the Street Fighter game. Using computer-generated bleeps and synthesized sounds to create a kind of wall of sound behind James Smith's vocals, tracks such as "That Boy That Girl" began to surface on the Internet as early as February 2007, and some of the tracks had also appeared on the EP Not Here to Please You, which was issued only as a downloadable set of tracks or on the relatively new format of a USB memory stick. The band waited until May 2008 to release its first proper album, which featured a programmed drumbeat and bassline throughout, making most of lyrical content almost irrelevant. One doubts Hadouken! knew too much about the Dutch techno band from the early '90s named 2 Unlimited, but the synth riffs bear a remarkable similarity. Near the end of the album was the track "Liquid Lives," a song that became a reasonably sized hit (well, number 36 for one week) in the early summer of 2007. Perhaps the album was a classic example of a band waiting too long to release it officially, and fans' excitement had already faded.