The Famous Class - "Have You Ever" (pledge music) 2/5

London self styled 'pop-punksters' The Famous Class have been building a bit of a reputation around them over the past year or so. Headline tours of China, bill topping Belgium festival apperanaces, 02 Academy tours.... They must be doing something right. But What?

I gotta admit I'm at loss to describe it. After all there's nothing remarkable on this four tracker at all. OK its it competent and well played, but its so bloody generic it could be by any one of the hundreds of 'You-and-Green-182-at-Six' clones that are chancing their arms all over the world. You can play through this ep and tick all the right boxes for 'pop-rock cliche 101' on every track; wall of fuzz guitar sound, teen angst/coming of age lyrics, mob yell stabs and backing vocal, chorus key changes, middle eight breakdown... hell this stuff is so formulaic it could have been penned by machine.... That's a thought, are TFC the result of some evil Frankenstein experiment to make the most perfectly cliche commercial pop-rock band in the world? There is a hint in the press blurb that came with this ep. Apparently the band applied to be the band in the adverts for a certain diabetes inducing commercial energy drink... and failed. Could it be that even the band themselves see themselves not as musicians but product?

(Note - the question can be answered by a short visit to the bands website, where your bombarded by a series of adverts for pot noodle type snacks before you can explore it... This is not a band, they are an ad agency)

As you can guess this leaves me cold. In a time when the UK music scene is alive with great music by outfits such as The Skuzzies, Elimination, I Divide, Dakesis, Awake and many many more this ep can only be a retrograde step, as it is nothing more than a clone of what the mainstream music industry has been pumping down our throats for the past few years via the likes of Kerrang!! fm etc, and does nothing to help raise the profile of what is really going on on the UK rock scene.

Still horses for course I suspose. You teenies who have yet to experience real music and fans of disposable teen agnst pseudo punk might like it, and good luck to them, but real rock and punk fans will want to give this one a very wide berth indeed.

Not recommended at all.

for fans of.. Greenday, Blink 182, You and Me at Six, Razorlight....