At this time last year, London three-piece Klaxons had barely finished self-decorating their first 7", "Gravity's Rainbow". By June, they were at the HMV buying their second single, the William Burroughs-invoking "Atlantis to Interzone". Soon the band found themselves headlining the NME's Indie Rave tour in support of a UK #2 album, the day-glo lit-geek princelings of a ginned-up "movement" they swiftly disavowed. A little backlash was to be expected, sorry.
And yet Klaxons are only the most recent manifestation of the British rock press' perennial compulsion to rediscover the very stuff it stereotypically ignores, dance music. Screeching production courtesy of Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford distinguishes the group's full-length debut, Myths of the Near Future, from British indie's recent trad blokeness. However, Klaxons singer/bassist Jamie Reynolds & co. aren't reviving the house and rave music actually heard during the UK's 1988 "Second Summer of Love", though Myths definitely owes a debt to the bands who translated that sound for guitars: the baggy-trousered likes of the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, and Happy Mondays. Instead, the strength of a few stellar songs in this 12-track set establishes Klaxons primarily as...one more catchy English guitar-pop group. Glowsticks, like last week's "angular" guitars, be damned.
The singles that built Klaxons' rep overseas-- re-recorded here in slightly more cluttered form-- make no shortage of dancefloor gestures. Then again, neither did fellow NME-proclaimed rock saviors Arctic Monkeys, at least lyrically, with 2005's "I Bet You Look Good on a Dancefloor"; on the Arctics' forthcoming album they, too, opt for the Ford production treatment. Though Alex Turner's dancefloor exhortations were essentially confined to words, Klaxons turn for their frantic pulse to the clattering rock rhythm sections of guitar-based New York club-dabblers from ESG to the Rapture. Klaxons' two-part, falsetto-sweetened "Gravity's Rainbow" chorus belies its high Pynchon brow, popping pills that !!! forgot to leave in Giuliani's schoolhouse for Bloc Party to pick up after their recent Washington Heights stop.
On "Atlantis to Interzone", the literal "klaxon" warning bleats that give the song its "nu-rave" cachet-- among provincial English teens, anyway-- basically deflect attention from soused guitar scribbles that wouldn't be out of place on the latest Arctics single. Anyway the Rakes, Franz Ferdinand, and Hard Fi all know those same disco hi hats. Meanwhile, the electropunk scream'n'stomp of Aleister Crowley paean "Magick" is less memorable than its accompanying hypestorm, in retrospect. "Golden Skans", which alludes to the album's eponymous story collection by British author J.G. Ballard, floats on keyboards not at all ill-suited for Paris's Ed Banger Records-- which also released the track. Or another French label, Kitsuné, which released a totally great Van She remix of "Gravity's Rainbow".
So, nevertheless, looking for a sequel to Daft Punk's Discovery? Seek elsewhere, fellow pilgrims. With a magnificent wordless vocal hook, "Skans" comes closer to guitar pop like the fatalistic Smiths of "A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours" than the filter disco of Ed Banger phenoms Justice. Wobbly B-movie lead guitar on "As Above, So Below" recalls Graham Coxon's buggiest glam-rock updates, and the macabre harmonies and bouncy groove of "Forgotten Works" aren't all that disparate from 13-era Blur, down to the deep-background howls-- Americans tend to forget Blur started as fundamentally a clever indie-dance band. Fact is, Klaxons are turning techno cognoscenti onto UK indie rock much more than vice versa. Many natural Klaxons listeners probably wouldn't recognize the Eurodance roots of "It's Not Over", a 90s hit on multiple occasions for various Paul Oakenfold projects. The Myths dance-rockers reshape the song as dreamy post-Stone Roses indie dance, shrill siren noises the biggest hint at its origins.
Klaxons' lyrical pretensions, alas, can be a reminder why the best house and trance music often emphasizes atmosphere over meaning. Where the Arctics focus on quotidian English life, Reynolds prefers to sing of Cyclopes, unicorns, and seven-volume Marcel Proust masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, in addition to the litany of literary references already mentioned above. At least jagged closer "Four Horsemen of 2012" finds humor in its snobbery, with its slogan of "Klaxons, not centaurs!" Elsewhere, for every evocative line about whippoorwills "turn[ing] east toward Westphalia" there's a "Serebella sitting on the totum timeline" while "hangmen also die, in famagusta's hive" (amid the DFA-like dance-punk of "Totem on the Timeline"). I thought we were supposed to be having fun?
Most of the time, we are. And we do: Klaxons' full-throttle racket can be very convincing on that point. Myths is a reminder that, though the UK rock press's relationship with dance music can be Byzantine, hyberbolic, and endlessly offputting, plenty of young UK bands continue to record fine pop songs-- whatever their subgenre affiliation. Klaxons are just a band, the English sage/emcee Scroobius Pip would surely remind us. Shit, yeah, and they're one well worth hearing.
