When a band describes itself as a cross between the Sex Pistols and Art Brut, alarm bells should start ringing. You can see what Reading’s “synth punks” Hello Wembley are trying to achieve – combine the biting, sneering anti-establishment venom and rawness of the Sex Pistols with Art Brut’s wry sideways look at modern British culture.
Instead, however, Hello Wembley only manage to take the worst things from both bands. Let’s face it, nowadays the Sex Pistols are a bunch of hypocritical and irrelevant old haddies, and Art Brut have never graduated to being anything more than a bit of a shitey joke band with one or two clever lyrics.
From the opening bars of ‘Up Great Britain’, we’re treated to some god awful Casio-style keyboards, which manage to spoil all four tracks of this record. Like Art Brut‘s Eddie Argos, singer Alex Waring does manage to squeeze out the odd semi-humorous line; “In Great Britain no class no style, no icons just Jeremy Kyle.”
However, you just get the impression with lines like “All Great Britain ever reads is Heat, square-eyed fat kids with PSPs” that they’re trying too hard to be relevant, contemporary and brash. Hello Wembley actually just come across as fakers, using what they read in the tabloids to loathsomely create songs that smirk patronisingly at what they see as being wrong with Britain.
There’s nothing clever about Hello Wembley. There’s nothing new, ground-breaking or even musically listenable about them either.
