Hadouken!: 'Not Here To Please You'

Occasionally as a music journalist you can be so scared of missing out on the 'next big thing' that you are willing to lose complete control of your senses and proclaim some of the world's worst bands to be "groundbreaking" and "revolutionary". Hence, The Others. The fear that you may be turning into your parents and are shocked by the God-awful racket that the kids are making with their new-fangled toys can make people do weird things. Hadouken! could well be such a band. Their uncompromising crunch of grime, nu-rave, hip-hop and hardcore happy house is an aural feast that will either send you into a limb-wiggling, head-banging frenzy or (more likely) reaching for the nearest pack of Nurofen.

Hadouken! don't want to be an ordinary band. They're not going to slink into the background with the passing of trends. They are not The Rakes. From their embracing and championing of nu-rave fashions to their futuristic computer-generated riffs, they are intent on making a stand as torch-bearers for the iPod generation. Everything they produce is shoe-horned together with any passing musical bandwagon and NME-invented movement. Not Here To Please You is so ruddy modern that it doesn't come on a CD. It comes on a stick. A USB stick to be precise. (What was ever wrong with humble cassette tape, hey?) While it makes a refreshing change from the grizzled retro-fashions that flourished in the '90s and early '00s, this dedication to 'the future' and being really radical stinks of record company promotional tools and probably stemmed from a bloke at Atlantic Records' idea of what da kids are getting down with these days.

So what actually lies behind the image of Hadouken!? Is there anything more to them than a Hoxton-ite's wet dream? What about the music? What is underneath the annoying !'s, singer James Smith's bravado and the lime green baseball caps and Nike pumps? Could they even be the result of some evil Chris Morris prank, that are going to be exposed as the advertising gimmick for another series of Nathan Barley? While we hope the latter is true, if we put on our sensible hats, it would appear more likely that Hadouken! are an unfortunate and enthusiastic set of kids that are going to be in for a nasty fall when the novelty factor wears off and the industry's claws dig in. Nobody will be wafting this record around in six months' time proudly declaring it life changing, let alone in six years. This record, or should we say USB, is a mess. It's tried squeezing together a million ideas and the result is a migraine-inducing load of old waffle.

The prospect of a seamless 36 minutes of heaving Prodigy squelches, Dizzee Rascal-style raps and industrial metal thumps might seem like a loada fun to some people, but call us old fuddy-duddies if it isn't all a bit too much to handle. The wash of synths and warped bleeps on opener 'Leap of Faith' that every-so-often merge into Nine Inch Nails-esque breakdowns is the band's battle cry. But its circling beats and techo-warbling masks what it is actually a fairly bog-standard rock track. The sort of thing you'd expect to hear on a Fightstar album. Well, The Klaxons have been successfully pedalling some fairly ordinary-sounding indie tunes under the nu-rave mask by whacking on a load of '80s computer effects, so why can't a few others join the party?

No, the real problems come when Hadouken! go all grime on us and take on rapping. Rather like the time your dad wore that Chicago Bulls baseball cap, or when your mum claimed she thought Coldplay were "hip", it's all very embarrassing. Smith clearly thinks he's a super-speed Mike Skinner on the mic, but it all sounds incredibly nasty and the warmth and humour of The Streets' garage beats are lost under his stewardship. The high-energy thud of 'Liquid Lives' and 'Girls' is clearly meant to be day-glo fun, but its electro-crash beats are uncompromising and needlessly aggressive.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this record is its ambition. Hadouken! are best when they work out a jam over a fairly predictable rock riff. They're at their worst when they take on Lethal Bizzle at hip-hop and lose badly. They are even worse when they try to make music that sounds like it's from the future. The result sounds like a band born to soundtrack The Crystal Maze's Futuristic zone. It's a cartoon depiction of what modern music should sound like. It's cold, calculated and the conclusion is an album that's about as appealing as a warmed-up bucket of vomit.