The preamble about Hard-Fi is something about DIY, self-financing, self-promotion and the dole. There's something about the middle-English wastelands in which the band live. Something else about inner city tower blocks adds weight to the working class credentials about which, no doubt, Virginia Woolf would have something or other to say. Some quasi-pretentious blurb about wanting to sell records in America beefs up what is, essentially, the same preamble that you'd get from The Kaiser Chiefs, or the Arctic Monkeys or whoever. Something in this preamble, however, seems to set Hard-Fi apart from these contemporaries and that is the unfaltering and arrant seriousness with which they take themselves. It is the fact that they seem to claim they are something different to the current cool-set. The fact that they seem to believe that, unlike The Subways or Babyshambles or whoever, their album, Stars of CCTV, is something new and groundbreaking and contains something that needed to be said.
Opening with lead single, "Cash Machine," it is immediately obvious that the preamble doesn't match the reality. Beginning with decent dub lines it soon shows its true colors as it descends into the same sub-Clash pap that we're so used to these days. With predictable lyrics about how we all work for money or something that hasn't been relevant this side of Karl Marx moving to England, the inauguration is more innocuous than revolutionary. Feeding into "Middle Eastern Holiday", with weak attempts at gang backing vocals, the tone of the album is set two songs in. It seems its all going to sound like a crap version of The Clash when The Clash weren't really all that great and delving into Sandinista. And it does. Stars of CCTV is deliberately under-produced and grainy, with lyrics that, apparently, find the same ground in Blair's 00's Staines as The Specials found in Coventry in Thatcher's 80's. If it sounds like a stretch, it's because it is.
Apparently there's a Joy Division influence somewhere in the mix but if you manage to find it, you're doing well. Catchy enough to sell well, Stars of CCTV never really offends. It just lies in that middle-rock mediocrity that seems so popular these days. Musically at least, Hard-Fi aren't any worse, or for that matter, much better than The Kaiser Chiefs or The Arctic Monkeys or any of the other nouvelle-Brit-indie bands they will share festival stages with over the coming months. The fact that they have fallen into the trap of socio-politics that haven't been relevant since The Sex Pistols makes it all the worse. It is, however, that unlike The Ordinary Boys or any of the other beat revivalists, Hard-Fi takes such a humorless approach to what they are doing that really sets them out from the crowd.
And, just when it seems it can't get any worse, we are thrown into the worst song Coldplay ever wrote, "Move On Now", the only real departure from the basic Clash-wannabe sound. Complete with Chris Martin impressions, maybe it's meant to be ironic, but it isn't. The inclusion of some horns at the end does nothing to save it from becoming five minutes of fearsome predictability. But as "Move On Now" is the epitome of the mediocrity that runs rampant over the whole record, redemption is found in the form of "Feltham Is Singing Out", which sounds like everything Hard-Fi say they sound like but don't - a fusion of modern rock and hip-hop that comes across as The Killers meets Cypress Hill.
For a band that they say don't want to be, "just another fuckin' indie band", Stars of CCTV is a disappointment of the highest order. It is just more music for the Ford Mondeo driving generations to listen to on the morning commute and maybe even more music to make those Ford Mondeo drivers think about how awful it must be to be poor. Given the apercus that they aren't afraid to introduce hip-hop, house, dub and reggae into their mix, Stars of CCTV is a particularly dull, generic, post-millennium British rock album that sounds just about 30 years out of date and contains nothing but glib references to anything other than The Clash and The Specials. Ultimately, it leaves that most bitter taste of a band that takes themselves so seriously they can't realize that they are just as big a joke as all the other bands that they deride for not being serious enough. At least in the case of all those other bands, they've never asked to be taken seriously.
