Let's not bullshit: That is an album cover for the ages, but it's disappointing that a LOLcat in a spacesuit has done a better job of causing stateside excitement for the Klaxons' new LP than the band's debut, Myths of the Near Future. Back home in the UK, Klaxons won the 2007 Mercury Prize with that album, gave bombastic interviews that namedropped Pynchon and the KLF, and had four hit singles plus a handful of other songs that could have been. But in the U.S., Myths seemed victimized by the same distrust of UK next-big-things that also hamstrung Arctic Monkeys and Foals and ended up being a strange combination of overhyped and underrated.
More than anything, it was the nu-rave tag that hurt: For one thing, pretty much of all the rest of that stuff has aged poorly to date. But Klaxons aren't really nu-rave, they're a genre unto themselves; Surfing the Void confirms that. Through a range of imperious vocal stylings, Jamie Reynolds' lyrics convey the sort of proggy mumbo-jumbo borne of both arcane literature and psychedelic drugs, but couched within punishingly dense half-punk, half-arena freakouts that probably sound terrible if you're high. What is "The Flashover" and what will a "myriad of silver disks" have to do with it? Beats me, but that hardly matters-- what does matter is how the chorus bumrushes your ears like a wave of blitzing linebackers.
Klaxons' real roots in rave are that they play to the madness of crowds-- "Echoes" and "Twin Flames" are marked with undeniable, hands-in-the-air choruses that are nonsense out of context but gain power as shared experiences. By and large, Klaxons are less pop and more rock on Surfing the Void, and it's undoubtedly tied with having nu-metal's house producer Ross Robinson behind the boards after a number of rejected producers and aborted recording sessions. It was a risky decision from an artistic standpoint-- Robinson is a four-star general on the wrong side of respectability, and he rarely does anything out of the red.
But the partnership is mostly inspired here, as few are better at catching sheer physical impact on tape and the end-to-end intensity of Klaxons' trades out the brittle treble of Myths for a thickness that justifies them as a fully formed rock band. Yet, though Surfing can match Myths on a song-by-song basis, the Hulked-out sound occasionally comes at the expense of their frantic artiness. Surfing intentionally doesn't give you a whole lot of space to yourself, and "Echoes" is pretty much the only entry point. If it doesn't draw you in from the word go, I imagine it'd be a tough task to take the spastic title track or the nerdier, all-loud Pixies style of "Venusia" on a case-by-case basis. But while Surfing occasionally fails and does so loudly, but there's something thrillingly unfashionable about how Klaxons take aim at their grayer peers with a tommy gun full of glowsticks-- they don't always hit their target, but it's a gloriously fun mess all the same.
