Review Summary: A British indie-rock band delivers something refreshingly new and good? Heavens!
As far as songs released in 2006 go, I don't think anything shocked me as much as "Atlantis To Interzone". The gap between me hearing it on 120 Minutes, which I watch religiously, and it becoming a major cult hit seems to have been about a week, which is pretty meteoric. But then, that fits a song that simply defies all logic. A siren-driven rave riff that's so simple it hurts, a near-atonal guitar riff built on tritones and augmented 5ths, four guys singing/shouting at once when none of them seem to be that good at singing in the first place, and lyrics like 'horses want to dance but find their wings are damaged, water damaged'....it SHOULD sound like total ***. Yet, somehow, it was one of the very best songs of the year. Like Art Brut having a fight with The Chemical Brothers over who could be the funniest and weirdest.
It's not that much of a signifier for the rest of the album as far as the sonics go (they only really qualify as 'new rave' for that one song), but it does provide an insight to the world of Klaxons. And that's a key thing - if a band are going to be this silly (and Klaxons can get pretty damn silly), they need to create their own world to do it in, the way that, say, The Flaming Lips do. Planet Klaxon is a place where the lyrics don't need to mean anything as long as they sound suitably funny and can be performed with both conviction and tongues in cheeks, where the music can be suitably spastic without ever actually seeming amateurish, where stupid puns like "Isle Of Her" (it's like the Isle Of Man, but 'I love her', see?) become charming, and where four grown men can sing harmonies and melodies that, without the song to back them up, would sound completely and utterly camp (see the 'woo-dee-do-do-de-doo-de-do. AH-HAH!' vocals in "Golden Skans"). Oh, and where Aleister Crowley reigns supreme - "Magick" and "As Above So Below" both being pretty explicit references.
For the most part,
Myths Of The Near Future is a slightly sloppy indie record, laced with electronics, that you happily dance to without actually being any good at dancing. They clean up pretty well though - the more straight, polished likes of "Golden Skans" losing none of the band's power. That may sound like just about every indie band around right now, but Klaxons throw themselves into this album with such head-first bravado and such a lack of wanting or needing to seem cool that they distance themselves from the pack immediately. The songwriting, too, sets them apart - or at least, the melodies do. "Two Recievers" and "Golden Skans" have got melodies that are pretty, expressive, and catchy as hell. Similarly, the hooks on "Atlantis To Interzone", "Magick", and the Julius Ceaser/Mother Theresa rhyme on "Totem On The Timeline" are completely irresistable. And the cover of Planet Perfecto's "It's Not Ever Yet" is utterly superb, effortlessly surpassing the original. It needs to be the next single - if it's not a huge hit all across Europe, it'll be one of the shocks of 2007. Not many bands manage to put together records with this many instantly memorable songs; certainly not many rock bands. That's very much a admirable quality in my book.
It's getting to the point where I'm getting ridiculed for keeping faith in British bands, specifically ones cursed by good reviews in the NME, releasing good material. That's why I'm glad albums like
Myths of The Near Future exist - when something like this is released, I realise I'm not the idiot people tell me I am. While Klaxons will probably be hyped up to a level they'll never realistically achieve (if they haven't already), this is still head and shoulders above most of the other material it's competing with in a crowded market.
