Famous First Words - Brother (Album Review)

Viva Brother - Famous First Words
3/10

Introducing:
Viva Brother. Here is a band covered in heaps of hype, poured on like toxic slurry by NME, Viva Brother began 2011 with a £250,000 record deal amid promises to take modern music by storm. All mouth, however, the more times lead singer and general nitwit Lee Newell asserted that he had 'character' - or more worryingly, 'bollocks' - the less believable and more desperate he became. Recently renamed from simply 'Brother' due to a threatened lawsuit from another - older - Brother, the band emerge from the ashes of torched copies of Dig Out Your Soul and Liam Gallagher's fag ends like, well, like a band made from ash: stinging your eyes before presumably blowing away and disintegrating in the wind.

The Album:
It's not so much an atrocity as I thought it would be. That's it. I said it. I mean, there are some absolutely awful parts of this album: the vocals undecidedly flicking between girly attempts to emulate Gallagherish falsetto and an only slightly more successful snarl about as intimidating as Hard-Fi, and impossibly more devoid of soul. The lyrics for some reason try to emulate The Enemy's dull monotony - 'I gotta job, that I don't want, no I don't want, I don't want' - with a narrative structure that at times makes Rebecca Black seem like J.M. Coetzee. The songs themselves borrow heavily from a certain genre from 90's Britain, and if there's any redeeming feature about this album as a straight up, completely un-self aware set of guitar songs, then it's the sickening similarity it shares with leviathans of lad-rock, Oasis, and Kasabian - both bands that managed to define a genre with some catchy, atmospheric anthems. Viva Brother's attempts to rip them off means that  at first their music will be quite easy on the ears to some, whilst leaving them completely empty of artistic credibility.

That said, who really needs artistic credibility? Is there anything wrong with carbon copying yourself from a band which was itself a carbon copy of The Beatles? And is that really all that Viva Brother are? I would argue no. Viva Brother, my friend, are so much more, if you look into the nihilistic void that is their soul, and come out with an inverted sense of the band as an 'absence' of virtue. Viva Brother, packed with their, actually quite funny, must-be-parody lyrics - 'it's burning like a big space rocket' - and over-the-top pomp present to you 'meta-lad-rock'. A refreshingly subversive take on British laddism itself, just as it seemed like there might be an Green Street-cum-EDL inspired revival of what is, as Viva Brother so cleverly show us, such a vacuous subculture. Just like the noughties mini-revolution of British TV sitcoms, bands like The Enemy and Hard-Fi were our Little Britain, and Lee Newell is our David Brent. Right?.. Right???

Sounds (too much) like:
Oasis, Kasabian, Hard-Fi, The Enemy

If you want to listen to Viva Brother's album: Famous First Words, then I seriously advise you to buy an Alan Partridge DVD instead. They'll be playing at Leeds and Reading festivals at the end of the month, and embarking on a full UK tour in September.