Send "These New Puritans " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Bassoons, French horns, Japanese taiko drums, a children's choir, Foley samples, incantations about secret recordings, labyrinths, and knights. And that's just Hidden's first two tracks. Raise your hand if you thought These New Puritans had it in them. Just two years ago, the band from Southend-- a UK borough set where the Thames meets the Black Sea-- took a stab at Gang of Four rhythms and Mark E. Smith vitriol. Their debut album, Beat Pyramid, made interesting uses of negative space and some of the record's spartan tracks turned up as killer remixes. But if anything, TNP were late to the post-punk revival party and about as likely to author a grandiose and triumphant concept album as Glasvegas.And yet Hidden is a strikingly inventive and original rock record. Granted, nothing is ever completely new in pop music, but the album freshly synthesizes older ideas (post-rock textures, no-wave skronk, Steve Reich-influenced phasing) and current trends (dubstep's delay, chart pop's stentorian synth lines, global beats). You have to listen really hard to hear any guitars. Similar to contemporaries Sigur Rós, Nico Muhly, and Joanna Newsom, These New Puritans challenge classical and popular value distinctions by fully integrating a 13-piece orchestra. A clutch of melodic motifs and variations weave through Hidden, keeping the song set extremely tight and aesthetically cohesive, so when "Orion"'s rabid beats and gothic choir feed into orchestral palette cleanser "Canticle", the transition is fluid and unpretentious....full text |
| Nme |
| It’s pretty obvious really, but noise is the heart of music. Yet, in a world where an addiction to compressed soundfiles has led to musicians smothering their songs in reverb and digital wash, sound is suffering. It’s exciting then to see These New Puritans living up to their name and dragging a fresh clarity of sound into the world. You might want to go and buy some new speakers, because listening to every sharpening knife, oboe, cough, mutter, dense syncopated beat, delicate piano, and choir on ‘Hidden’ through your complementary iPod headphones is like looking at a photocopy of a Bruegel, or watching The Wizard Of Oz in black and white. Trust me, this is a record worth ram-raiding Bang & Olufsen for. With their second album, TNP have extended themselves beyond any rock’n’roll terminology and instead are rubbing shoulders with sound artisans like Mira Calix, exploring noise like a photographer explores light. Fittingly then, as they wave goodbye to The Fall-loving art-rock group they once were, the record begins with a Last Post of sorts as, from their own Ypres, TNP roll out ‘Time Xone’’s mournful brass farewell to everything you thought you knew about this band....full text |
| Bbc |
| Interviewed around the time of These New Puritans’ debut album Beat Pyramid back in January 2008, frontman Jack Barnett wasn’t dwelling on the past, but looking to the future. The band’s new material, he exhorted, sounded “like dancehall meets Steve Reich” and went on to claim “I’ve been writing a lot of music for bassoon.” At the time, this probably elicited a few sniggers; another group of indie wastrels whose ideas far outstripped their ability. But there was enough to Beat Pyramid to suggest this young Southend-on-Sea band had a rather good idea of what they were doing. Now their second album arrives, and impressively it turns out that Barnett’s blue-sky dreaming is actually a pretty accurate description of Hidden – heavily beat-driven, almost entirely absent of guitars, and laced with large amounts of elaborately arranged woodwind and brass....full text |
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