You couldn't throw a review of Hard-Fi's 2005 debut, Stars of CCTV, around a room without hitting a Clash reference (because, you know, they liked dub too). And the title of the sophomore release from Staines, UK's second most famous export, well in line with the punk legends' penchant for big-picture statements and American outlaw iconography. However, Once Upon a Time in the West proves to be a throwback not to 1979, but 1997.
It's a year that a recent Onion AV Club feature claimed was as canonical as 1967-- what with watershed albums by Radiohead, Sleater-Kinney, and Elliott Smith, among others-- but in the realm of UK pop culture specifically, the memory is more bittersweet: On the one hand the year delivered one last gust of bluster before the Britpop bubble burst (Oasis' Be Here Now, The Verve's Urban Hymns); on the other, it represents the fleeting (if ultimately failed) promise of electronica becoming the new rock music (Prodigy's The Fat of the Land, Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole). Hard-Fi sound like a time capsule from this particular moment in British pop: pitching every song to the bleachers at Wembley, open to electronic rhythmic enhancements and, more often than not, over-inflated with a sense of conviction and self-belief even when the lyrics don't rise above simple soapbox sloganeering.
Frontman Richard Archer famously told the NME this year that he's more interested in challenging the likes of Eminem in the American Top 40 than Razorlight in the UK indie charts, and to their credit, Hard-Fi's music is bereft of any Brit colloquialisms that might limit their appeal to the isles. But their staunch determination to make music for the masses means that Once Upon a Time in the West sounds like it was put together through focus-group consultation. Eclecticism may be the antidote to stagnation, but Hard-Fi have a way of blurring their myriad inspirations-- be it dub, ska, Madchester, gospel choruses, modern r&b, or string-swept Britpop balladry-- into compact but ultimately non-descript songs that move neither body nor soul: "I Shall Overcome" jacks the clipped acoustic riff to JT's "Like I Love You", but any libidinous tension is sucked out by a portentous chorus that slathers on heavy synth and string effects for extra gravitas; while the album's other overt nod to contemporary dance culture, "We Need Love", is schaffel-techno minus the sleaze, which sort of defeats the purpose.
Underscoring the album's generic feel are Archer's easy targets: 9-to-5 slave drivers ("work till you die/ that's what they teach"), television ("the new religion") and politicians ("they never listen"). Hard-Fi are a much more enjoyable proposition when they resist the urge to colour their world with such broad strokes, as on plaintive piano ballad "Help Me Please", and the uncharacteristically upbeat soul-pop jaunt, "Can't Get Along (Without You)". But the band is rarely encumbered by such bouts of humility. Halfway through the opening "Suburban Knights", Archer has already launched a pre-emptive strike against the haters: "To all these people who criticize us/ we're only saying what we see with our own eyes." Unfortunately, his wide-angle vantage overlooks the fact that, for an album that rails against the doldrums of sedentary suburban living, Once Upon a Time in the West is pretty dull itself.
