Klaxons album fails to live up to hype

By Jordan Sargent

Published Jan. 30, 2007

United Kingdom rave revivalists Klaxons are the prime example of a band existing in a music scene post-Arctic Monkeys. This is a scene in which people find it completely plausible for three guys to show up on the cover of a country's biggest magazine with only two songs to their name, of which probably 45 people have heard.

Diatribes on the devolution of England's popular music press are about as hackneyed as the magazines themselves, so I'll spare the both of us. But like it or not, their presence — especially NME's — is as great and wide-ranging as ever. Also, I mention NME in 83 percent of my stories.

So here stand Klaxons, a good band with two freakishly great singles, "Atlantis to Interzone" and "Gravity's Rainbow," as launching pads for its debut Myths of the Near Future, an album that's not so much comprised of hits and misses as it is hits and mehs. It's also a surprising record that when compared to the rowdiness of its pre-empted releases is spacey and at its best, pretty sublime.

If I've turned you off to making time to go and seek out this album, that's fine. Start on YouTube. There you will find all you need to get acquainted with the best the Klaxons have to offer: the aforementioned "Atlantis to Interzone" and "Gravity's Rainbow" as well as the newest single "Golden Skans."

"Atlantis to Interzone" is probably the best thing these guys will ever be a part of. It's the kind of transcendent dance track that I would have flipped out for, such as "What is Love" pre-"Night at the Roxbury," when I was 11 years old and going to roller rinks all the time. Its first 20 seconds — a shouted "DJ!," huge bass thump, air-raid sirens and sampled, almost orgasmic "uh-oh-oh" — announce its greatness immediately. And if I had first heard this thing at a party, I would have stopped whomever I was with and gave them the "holy shit" look. It's that good of a song; something shamelessly retro but still forward-thinking in this era of four-piece Monkeys rip-offs and 29-person glockenspiel outfits.

"Gravity's Rainbow," reworked and cleaned up here from the Xan Valley's EP with shards of guitar noise exploding everywhere like shrapnel, loses some of its momentum but sounds rightfully more chaotic. And its soaring, falsetto chorus wooing its subject to "travel to infinity" is both a show-stopper and one of the album's best audible vocal moments.

"Golden Skans" follows the album's template more closely. It's a pretty good ballad, powered by a cascading vocal melody that sounds like an ADD-raddled take on the slower, piano-driven songs on The Rapture's debut.

The video for it has the band floating in mid-air, and that's the kind of comforting, stagnant feeling this song evokes.

The rest of the album almost blends together. "As Above, So Below" and "Isle of Her" are slightly worse takes on "Golden Skans" and "Totem on the Timeline" and "Magick" work the same muddled, static bass line. Only "It's Not Over Yet" and "Two Receivers" are able to recapture the magic with clearer melodies and the same soaring falsettos.

In all, Myths of the Near Future, is a rather decent debut from a band we'll probably never hear from again.

The three magnificent singles loom over the album, and when they come on, it's like atom bombs going off amongst bottle rockets.

Then again, maybe I just don't get this album. The last 22:20 of silence then two minutes of trippy, gurgling noises a la the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever," lead me to believe that the true enjoyment of this stuff involves the intake of drugs I don't know how to get — and that's a whole different story.