Futureheads The Futureheads

You know what? We've got Thatcher and Blair to thank for all of this. As Blur once so succinctly put it, modern life is rubbish. We live in a time of fast food and short attention spans. Call centres have swallowed up a large percentage of the nations youth, and as a result a whole generation of 18 to 35 year olds have had all the creativity and lust for life rinsed out of them, only to be replaced by endless days of 'Call Stats' and 'Sales Ratios'. in the mid 90s, Britpop and 'New' Labour promised us a 'New Tomorrow', one that was full of opportunities and promise for young and old alike. Eight years later, we're still waiting.

But people are starting to get annoyed with this. Although music has never been proven to be a catalyst for serious social change, all of a sudden, bands are cropping up all over the UK, and they're not happy. In fact, they're pretty fucking annoyed. And The Futureheads are at the forefront of this. Their eponymous debut album, two years in the making, simmerswith all of the pent-up tension that you would expect from a band who have experienced Blair's Britain, and are distinctly unimpressed with it. But to take this album purely as a socio-political statement would be incredibly pretentious of me. The reason The Futureheads is so good is because, quite simply, the music is simply stunning. Tracks such as album opener Le Garage and Decent Days and Nights are wound-up balls of New Wave tension, sung in a manic call-and-response fashion by a band that take the white hot energy of bands such as XTC and the political rhetoric of Gang of Four and mould them into a noise that, in places, sounds like The House Martins singing Caravan of Love in a bath full of electric eels. The only respite from this high-energy ball of energy is the gentle, barbershop-quartet esque Danger of the Water, but this is only a momentary breather before The Futureheads get back to doing what they do best: sounding like a gaggle of 8 year old children on a sugar high. The lyrics are simmering with bile and discontent with the state of the nation, with tracks such as Robot and First Day (sample lyric: "And they say 'Faster! Faster! it's time to take it to the next stage.'/ But it is only your first day, and you're not ready for the next stage".) shouting in the face of British corporate doublespeak and work culture with the kind of fury and hate that it deserves. As John Lydon once sang, anger is an energy, and The Futureheads have done what few bands have managed to do before them and managed to mould the two into a near-perfect partnership. Ok, so it lacks a bit of light and shade with regards to pace and tempo, but who cares? It's nice to hear an album that buzzes with enough energy to power the national grid. If you want to hear ballads, go and listen to your Keaneplay albums.

A clarion call to the sad and disenfranchised, tired of this workaday world, in a sane world, The Futureheads shouldn't exist. But this world is far from sane, and that's why we need bands like them more than ever. Do the right thing.