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The Hours

It’s with a sense of resignation that I write about the next band. Like so many bands that have a buzz surrounding them, they’ve hardly done a lot to deserve all the hype – to date they’ve released just two singles. Not a lot to build a reputation on. However, when you’re as well connected as The Hours, it’s not as though you need to try too hard. They’re already being plugged by Jarvis Cocker, who said of the band: "They understand what music is for – it's for human beings to communicate with other human beings. It's that simple, it's that important. Let them into your life. You won't regret it".

Now, there are few people I have more musical admiration for than Jarv – normally, if he says a group is that good, I’d believe him. However, there’s something suspicious about the way the group seem to be trading on their support from high profile artists like Cocker – you can find the above quotation everywhere, all over the net, from interviews with the band to their own website, where it gets pride of place. It’s as though they’re desperate to squeeze the last drop of credibility from this single, solitary quote.

Then came the other tit-bits of information that led me to slightly dislike the band before I ever heard them. Let’s do a quick rundown on the reasons why lead singer Ant Genn sounds like the kind of person you really wouldn’t want to be stuck talking to at a party:

1) By the time he was 16 he was playing guitar for Pulp.

2) He spent the summer of 1995 sleeping on Robbie William’s floor. The two of them wrote songs together and “introduced each other to some really good music”.

3) He used to be “seriously” addicted to crack cocaine and heroin, causing some of his teeth to fall out.

4) He toured with the dreary Britpop girl-group Elastica.

All very impressive, you might add, all very ‘rock and roll’ But I can’t stop imagining being trapped in a corner while he tells you all this, trying to show off his credentials.

The other half of the band, multi-instrumentalist Martin Slattery, is no less well connected, having worked with Sean Ryder’s band Black Grape, and being part of the late Joe Strummer’s backing band, The Mescaleros. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention – the artwork for the band was done by Brit-artist millionaire Damian Hirst. Full points for networking. But what are they like musically?

For a man who claims to be “intolerant of bad lyrics” after having worked with the likes of Cocker, Genn seems to have penned some pretty weak songs. One of his songs runs: “I love you more than my Adidas trainers / I love you more than my hooded tops”. All very post-modern, all very ironic, perhaps we’re meant to think. To me, however, these just read like disappointing, uninspired lyrics.

And the music? Perhaps my initial scepticism has clouded my judgement. Perhaps my nightmarish vision of being stuck in a lift with the lead singer, telling me all about Robbie Williams’ interior decoration, has influenced me. But to my ears, the Hours sound like a watery version of the ever-so-watery band Keane. The same ‘uplifting’ melodies. The same heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity. The same bland and uninspiring sound.

Jarvis, old pal, sorry to do this to you, but I have to disagree. The Hours may well be The Next Big Thing. But I’m not willing to let them into my life. Sorry.