The Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future

Genre rock Publisher Geffen Records External Links Official Klaxons Website Official Geffen Records Website

OK, folks. Stop divvying up those serotonin-boosters for a second, and gimme about 500 words of your attention. Your newest installation of New Rave is cooling on the windowsill courtesy of The Klaxons, begging for you to serve it up at your next dance-themed party. Be sure to drink plenty of water. With three main tracks pulled from their recent Xan Valleys EP and 11 tracks total, this London-based group has pieced together an album suitable for a futuristic spaceship dance rave blasting towards distant and mythical realms. A young group, they exhibit a wildness that results in exciting twists as well as some amateurish missteps. Major disorientation in positive and negative ways to be sure.

"Atlantis to Interzone" is an all out Escape From New York dystopia of a song. Air sirens rattle away any notion of calm while a fantastic bassline deliberately drives a frenzied pace, speeding from garbage pile to garbage pile, dodging random gunfire. It's a wasteland world, full of burning cars, oncoming storms, untold dead, poisoned rivers. And this song is the equivalent of flying past it all down a 20% grade in a rickety K-Mart shopping cart. And after you pull yourself from your crippling crash, you've gotta jump, dance, and rock. It's what's expected in times of danger and wartime.

Sadly, there are only a few songs on the album that deviate much at all from their designated successful sound. "Atlantis" is a good blueprint of their style using quick guitars and drum beats to create an angry Ghost Rider sound, all barreling down your front door, plundering, breaking, running over your old asthmatic terrier. But too many songs either hold on to the same structure and tempo, as seen in "Totem on the Timeline" and "It's Not Over Yet," or slow the same type of song to more of an intense crawl, as on "As Above, So Below." The same offsetting high, howling voices correspond to the doom and destruction of the white noise grids. Even "Gravity's Rainbow," while equally as good as "Atlantis," and featuring great feedback squeals and sonic cuts doesn't change too much from the norm. When they do try something different such as "Isle of Her," the result is slow, slogging chants to "Row! There's only seven more miles to go!" in an attempt to recreate some sort of Homeric travelogue. Avoidable stuff, that.

One song that manages to emerge from the pulsating plateau is "Golden Skans" featuring all kinds of metallic angels cooing a central melody. Slightly more mellow, the foundation of the song is a series of simple repeated bass notes, while the actual meat is in their combined musical vocal tones. Great piece of work, with lots of interesting intertwining electronic sounds. But green as they are, the Klaxons need an injection of diversity to avoid repetition. There are plenty of ways to incite madness and terror, after all.