Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 05/02/07
Label: Polydor

The Hours' singer Anthony Genn is a man with previous. He streaked across the stage when Elastica played Glastonbury in 1995 and, bizarrely, later served a brief stint on keyboards. He also joined Pulp for a while, collaborated with Joe Strummer in Mescaleros and wrote songs with Robbie Williams. When his heroin addiction started to bite, Damien Hirst paid for his rehab and agreed to part-fund The Hours' debut album.

Sounds like an interesting guy, right? He isn't. Rather, Genn's a man who thinks in clichés and "Narcissus Road" is clogged with his trite homespun 'wisdom'. One song, "Icarus", is built around the refrain "If you don't shoot, you don't score". And the Icarus character of the title? Apparently he "flew too close to the sun". You didn't see that one coming did you? Whether he's singing about the "greatest comeback since Lazarus" or "You can't fit a square peg into a round hole", wearisome predictability is Genn's trademark.

He's clearly spent too much time lazily pondering life's great mysteries while waiting for various substances to kick in. The first track hasn't even elapsed when Genn hits us with this: "Ludwig Van, how I love that man / Well, the guy went deaf and didn't give a fu*k." It's a line notable for its strange mix of pretension and stupidity, and later the charge sheet racks up to include delusions of grandeur. Even the album's best lyric ("Well who was the richest man in Vienna when Mozart was alive? Who gives a f*ck?") is undermined by an implied comparison.

"Narcissus Road" appears to be an album Genn wrote mainly for his friends. Take "Love You More", which includes this pearl: "I love you more than Tony Soprano - for those who do not know me that's a f*ck of a lot!" That addendum, tacked on as an afterthought, seems to assume that Genn's mates will make up the majority of listeners. Even less inviting, for the rest of us, is Genn's assumption that he's already famous. It's when he sings "I've heard it said I live in a dream world" that the scale of his self-obsession comes into sharpest focus.

So, Genn's a dreadful lyricist, but what about the music? Well, mostly it's tuneful, pleasant stuff with plenty of drive-time appeal. Indeed, as the album wears on, pianos and balladry come to the fore in a manner that pits The Hours as a rival to Keane, Coldplay, Snow Patrol and other popular, boring, mid-market bands big on song-craft and wistful platitudes. Yet even those bands don't hammer the clichés as hard as The Hours. To sum them up, let's subversively reverse one: it's not who you know, it's what you know.

    by Niall O'Keeffe