Send "Klaxons " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Let's not bullshit: That is an album cover for the ages, but it's disappointing that a LOLcat in a spacesuit has done a better job of causing stateside excitement for the Klaxons' new LP than the band's debut, Myths of the Near Future. Back home in the UK, Klaxons won the 2007 Mercury Prize with that album, gave bombastic interviews that namedropped Pynchon and the KLF, and had four hit singles plus a handful of other songs that could have been. But in the U.S., Myths seemed victimized by the same distrust of UK next-big-things that also hamstrung Arctic Monkeys and Foals and ended up being a strange combination of overhyped and underrated.More than anything, it was the nu-rave tag that hurt: For one thing, pretty much of all the rest of that stuff has aged poorly to date. But Klaxons aren't really nu-rave, they're a genre unto themselves; Surfing the Void confirms that. Through a range of imperious vocal stylings, Jamie Reynolds' lyrics convey the sort of proggy mumbo-jumbo borne of both arcane literature and psychedelic drugs, but couched within punishingly dense half-punk, half-arena freakouts that probably sound terrible if you're high. What is "The Flashover" and what will a "myriad of silver disks" have to do with it? Beats me, but that hardly matters-- what does matter is how the chorus bumrushes your ears like a wave of blitzing linebackers. Klaxons' real roots in rave are that they play to the madness of crowds-- "Echoes" and "Twin Flames" are marked with undeniable, hands-in-the-air choruses that are nonsense out of context but gain power as shared experiences. By and large, Klaxons are less pop and more rock on Surfing the Void, and it's undoubtedly tied with having nu-metal's house producer Ross Robinson behind the boards after a number of rejected producers and aborted recording sessions. It was a risky decision from an artistic standpoint-- Robinson is a four-star general on the wrong side of respectability, and he rarely does anything out of the red....full text |
| Guardian |
| Whether or not you think Klaxons deserved to beat Amy Winehouse and Bat for Lashes to win the 2007 Mercury prize, you have to admit it made for good telly. Visibly under the influence, the quartet seemed genuinely gobsmacked by their good fortune. Firm in the belief that an entertaining lie is preferable to a mundane truth, they then told reporters that they planned to invest their winnings in research into telepathy. Klaxons' victorious debut, Myths of the Near Future, was partly inspired by the KLF's prankish guidebook The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), and gave the impression of a band winging it in style. The ostentatious references to JG Ballard, Thomas Pynchon and Aleister Crowley were as cosmetic as the self-assigned, tongue-in-cheek genre tag "new rave", which said more about their Day-Glo outfits and occasional covers of 90s dance hits than the actual sound of their frenetic indie-rock. But they had the melodic chops to share the joke with the rest of the class, and the album's success outstripped even the band's expectations. Now it seems that all the talk of telepathy and the apocalyptic signifiance of 2012 might not have been just window-dressing. In recent interviews about the troubled gestation of Surfing the Void, their bright, likable frontman Jamie Reynolds has been predictably frank about rejected producers (Tony Visconti, Focus) and abandoned sessions (with Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford). But he's also been talking about experiencing biblical visions during ritual ingestion of the Peruvian hallucinogen ayahuasca, and the influence of Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. "We believe in the collective consciousness and the world shift, and the dissolving of boundaries and the bringing together of humanity, and everybody having the same objective and living together in harmony," Reynolds told one interviewer who, presumably, couldn't believe his luck. You don't get that from Scouting for Girls....full text |
| Bbc |
| Who are these people, and in which stinking Shoreditch alley have they dumped the soiled, miaow-riddled body of new rave? Three years ago Klaxons were painted as the spurious genre’s idiot storm troopers by a music media who made the whole thing up anyway before ditching the band to free up valuable column inches for the altogether more pressing business of reporting Pete Doherty’s drug farts. Meanwhile, the trio’s nods to 90s rave culture – some bright hoodies and squelchy synths – instantaneously earned them the ire of ‘serious’ critics who hoped the whole dreadful racket would simply do the decent thing and fall on its own glowstick. Luckily for Jamie Reynolds, James Righton and Simon Taylor-Davis, they were able to laugh the entire caper off as a private joke that got out of hand, and if their 2007 debut album Myths of the Near Future has worn about as well as the reedy earliest efforts of, say, Depeche Mode and The Prodigy, then Surfing the Void finds them operating nearer those two bands’ high water marks: Violator and The Fat of the Land. The catalyst for this miraculous turnaround appears to be the unlikely figure of producer Ross Robinson, better known for sprinkling his angle grinder’s fairy dust on albums by Korn, Limp Bizkit and Slipknot. Earlier sessions with Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford resulted in Polydor supposedly rejecting the first version of the album, but Robinson is an inspired choice, his way with skull-crushing density ‘roiding up Klaxons’ sound like a muscle mary. There’s no smoke without fire, however, and the band still needed to come up with the framework on which Robinson could hang his sonic black holes....full text |
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