Single review: The Humour – One More Drink

OK, someone tell me that this is a work of satire so exquisitely crafted that it’s virtually indistinguishable from the risible clichés it’s lampooning. Please? The Humour‘s self-titled EP of last year was ebulliently unconcerned with chasing after fashion and showcased a young band who might have gone on to do something interesting (in a retro-pop-rock kind of way), but new single “One More Drink” pisses all over the glimmering flame of that particular candle. Hope lies dead, extinguished; The Humour have been sucked into the churning clone factory of young British pop-metal and re-extruded in the industry-standard format.

“One More Drink” seems to remind me of the third jokey track from that aforementioned début EP, to the extent that I suspect it was cannibalised for parts to make this “serious” tune, with the naively charming adolescent exuberance of the former swapped out for an attempt to sound like hard-drinking all-nigh-dancing party-hard hedonists. Maybe The Humour are all of those things – I dare say they could probably drink me under the table, though that’s not really much of a challenge – but do they sound like they are? No, in a word. They sound like a public-school drama class trying to act out a scene from a William Burroughs novel, all rigid-faced, overemphasising the wrong things, gesticulating wildly like extras from Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace. It’s so utterly false that I almost can’t credit it.

The B-side quickly disabuses The Humour of the satire defence; “Stronger Without You” is overproduced lighters-aloft stadium-cheddar as reinterpreted by kids who grew up watching spandex-clad muppets prancing around on their parents’ tellies and assumed it as a sort of quasi-ironic cultural baseline. It’s like a jackpot-winning bingo-card of hollow radio-rock clichés assembled with all the quotidian tedium of a teen-B-movie soundtrack circa 1986, and no amount of “weer playin da frickin Brixtron Academy OMFG” reverb can hide a song so by-the-numbers that you could likely use it to solve the sudoku puzzles in the Daily Sport.

I mean, guys, come on, the self-titled EP was good – you still had a sense of fun, rather than this studied imitation of a bombast and cod-authentic pop credibility that, frankly, you just can’t live up to. You had promise, you sounded a bit different… but now it seems you’ve signed up to the growing roster of Bands Who Think Sounding Like Lostprophets (Only More Accessible) Will Get Them Somewhere. That boat has sailed, people. Move on.