Of all the cretinous, audacious crimes committed by Klaxons (inventing the nu-rave genre and all the day-glo Skins-gen horridness attached to it, binning the first edition of their sophomore album because their label dubbed it too prog, subjecting their poor cat to space travel in a gammy orange spacesuit, It’s Not Over Yet, etc.) Surfing the Void must be the most deplorable of all: a follow-up album that’s really quite impossible to dislike. The ascendance of the London three-maybe-four-piece from fad genre denizens to fully-signed-up members of the British pop mainstream seems contradictory on paper – a band reviving one of the more maligned musical aesthetics of the past 40 years and pairing it with surrealist lyrics indebted to Thomas Pynchon, Aleister Crowley and, well, Kicks Like A Mule and riding it to the apex of the British album charts* has a more-than-appropriate KLF undertone to it – in execution, sense prevails. That Atlantis To Interzone’s and Golden Skans’ effortless craft should be put down to an NME abberation is shameful. Smack the next twerp who tells you Klaxons are fashion mag twats.
Surfing the Void has not transformed Klaxons into Muse. It has not transformed them into MGMT. It has not melted them into a churning, viscous oil spill of a band short of ideas. It hasn’t, in fact, changed very much at all. I fell asleep watching Carpenter’s Dark Star the other night, and this album lands perfectly in the middle of a projection of B-movie intergalactics into slow-wave sleep – its pulse is less frenetic than Myths of the Near Future, and its songwriting less one-dimensional, but the same cod-futurist psychedelia prevails lin the manner of a David Cronenberg trope, never quite sincerely detached enough from the underlying need to write memorable pop moments to be convincingly arty, but certainly never too bombastic to subjugate the over-riding fun-ness of their music.
Void’s emphasis is on energy, rather than hooks. Opening track Echoes is the biggest single by several parsecs thanks to verse-chorus dynamics as opposed to looping ‘Oooh-oooh-oooh-weh-oooh AHH’ ad infinitum in the Golden Skans mode – it’s a less abrasive and more attractive approach to single-making, a maturity in the least nobby sense. Their most winning traits – malevolent basslines (Extra Astronomical), psychotic rave breaks (Cyberspeed), borderline house piano (Flashover) and distinctly folklorish vocal harmonies (Venusia) – all maintain the record’s vitality beyond the regular album shelf-life. You’ll come out the other end with the realization the Klaxons have solved a pretty complex equation indeed.
See also: The KLF – The White Room [KLF Communications], This Heat – Deceit [Rough Trade], Primal Scream – Evil Heat [Sony]
* If we dis-count, as we should, the existence of Norah Jones entirely.
Words: Daniel Gray
