The Best New Rave Band

Look, a review!

Klaxons - Myths Of The Near Future

Picture the scene: The BRIT awards, 2012. Things are going very well. The winners of the Best Album Released Over A 14 Week Period As A Series Of Podcasts award have just collected their trophy and announced that they’re quitting the industry to take up busking (which by now involves little more than emailing mp3s to strangers with the subject PLEASE GIVE ME SOME MONEY). The Arctic Monkeys are preparing to play a greatest hits set marking their lifetime achievement “gong”, and you yourself are about to go onstage to collect your award for Best Female. You shift nervously in your seat as they go through the nominees. A quick check of your frock and shoes to make sure they look okay and… OH MY GOD YOU’VE GOT A COCK. How did that get there?! ‘Surely this is not anatomically correct’, you think to yourself as you look to see if your distress has been noticed. You’re not the Best Female at all. You’re not even female! Something’s gone terribly wrong!

Clearly, you’ve been incorrectly labelled throughout your entire career.

Such is Klaxons’ present situation. They’re not the Best New Rave Band, even though everyone says they are. They’re not even a New Rave band, because - get this - New Rave is a made up genre and there are no New Rave bands. So what the fuck are they then? It’s a tricky question and, judging by the sound of this debut, one that not even they themselves know the answer to. Are they indie? No (they’re quite interesting). Are they pop? No (far too much feedback). Are they dance? Yes (but not in that way). For now, it seems, Klaxons will have to settle with being the best new band that we have no bloody idea how to describe.

Usually, when a band’s sound is described as ‘indefinable’, it means that their record is a complete mess: songs veering off in twelve different directions, jazz horns coming at you from all angles, that sort of thing. There is no such problem with ‘Myths Of The Near Future’, which, for all its fantastical meanderings, is actually quite focused. Klaxons do have a distinct sound, and ultimately it is definable. It’s just so… alien.

When awarding Atlantis To Interzone our own MUCH COVETED Track Of The Year award, we said that it was a “three-minute moon buggy ride through some quite ridiculous terrain”, and much of the album follows the same ethos, except now they’ve got rockets, submarines, magic carpets and time machines as well as moon buggies, and the journey is a little longer. Klaxons make good old fashioned adventure music; music that takes you to places you’d never imagined yourself going, thinking things you’d never thought to think before. As they drag you along on their intergalactic joyride it becomes clear that the band like to pilfer two things from every magical stop they make: rhythm and melody. This record is packed full of both. This ensures that the fast n’ dirty hipshakers (‘Totem On The Timeline‘, ‘Gravity‘s Rainbow‘) never sink into being dirges of noise, just as the times when they might wanna, y’know, put some proper singing in (and there’s a lot of improper singing on this record), are never weighed down by becoming Indie Music You Can’t Dance To. Add to this mastery of the basics a penchant for the bizarre and a gleeful willingness to subvert and you’re looking at a very impressive proposition indeed.

Of the familiar singles, it is not our Track of 2006 that shines brightest here. That honour goes to the fearsome ‘Magick’, the kind of song that Zane Lowe runs into walls for, and what comes over like the sound of trying to complete a speed level on Sonic The Hedgehog while in real life your house burns down around you (particularly the last 30 seconds). It is, essentially, the last ‘proper’ song on the album and it towers, in terms of menace at least, over most of what precedes it. As for the others, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and ‘Four Horsemen’ have been given shiny new overdubs, ‘…Interzone’ is still totally amazing, and even ‘Golden Skans’ sounds a lot more interesting in its new surroundings; but there at least three other songs here that you won’t be as familiar with yet but which are capable of becoming true Klaxons classics in time (‘Isle Of Her’ for starters). Even the cover of ‘Not Over Yet’ works, against all reasonable expectation.

We’re still no closer to accurately pinning down the type of music that Klaxons actually make (although we do quite like ‘Adventure Music’), and when you listen to the album you start to wonder if maybe that’s the point. Why would they want to be seen as the best new band in a given genre when they’re blatantly so good at loads of them? For now, Klaxons will have to settle for being the Best New Band, full stop.