Transmission: incredible

Sound Advice #2: 

Klaxons – Surfing The Void (2010)

Go on, admit it. You’d written them off as another novelty act, hadn’t you?

You probably remember Klaxons as the leading (disco) lights of the short-lived, media-fuelled and, to be honest, largely non-existent ‘nu-rave’ scene of almost a decade ago.

If you think hard enough, you’ll probably also recall that there wasn’t really anything particularly ‘ravey’ about them (they didn’t properly venture into electronic music until last year’s ‘Love Frequency’) and that they were only really lumbered with that albatross of a tag because they emerged at a time when any band with a keyboard player was immediately branded a ‘dance-punk/indie-dance crossover’ act by lazy music critics.

Okay, they famously covered Grace’s ‘Not Over Yet’ and Kicks Like A Mule’s ‘The Bouncer’ and they (perhaps reluctantly) became synonymous with glowsticks and the kind of dayglo fashions not seen since Fat Willy’s was clothing our nation’s children in the early 90s, but if we really must pigeonhole them then Klaxons were, at heart, a psychedelic band – and a great one at that.

There’s no denying debut album ‘Myths Of The Near Future’ was a great record and, yes, it did capture a ‘moment’ in British alternative music history, but I put it to you that the band’s real piece de resistance was, in fact, second album ‘Surfing The Void’.

While ‘Myths…’ was a playful, multi-coloured patchwork quilt of an album made by a bunch of wide-eyed whippersnappers who you suspected couldn’t quite believe their luck, its follow-up was a much more mature-sounding record produced by a band who were no longer simply ambitious – they actually walked the walk, sounding confident in their own abilities.

Polydor apparently made the band re-record large chunks of ‘Surfing The Void’ on the grounds that what they had presented to the label was ‘too experimental’ (that’s major label speak for ‘not mainstream enough'). However, at no point does the finished product feel like the work of a band who’ve had to compromise (even though it is), instead sounding like a fully rounded album by a band (and they WERE a full band by now, with a full-time drummer and everything) who had trusted their instincts and found their direction.

Lyrically, the fantastical, futurist themes are still present and correct (the frankly fantastic album cover art alone should provide a glaringly obvious clue that they’re not going to be singing about going to the chip shop on the way home from the pub) and musically, the ludicrously catchy choruses are even more, erm, ludicrously catchy than before (from opener and lead single ‘Echoes’ right through to adrenaline-pumping closer ‘Cypherspeed’), but everything just sounds bigger, better, more complete.

Crucially, it’s the sound of a band who’ve managed to throw off the shackles of that whole embarrassing nu-rave nonsense and turn in their strongest work to date.

What’s really baffling, however, is that while around 350,000 people bought ‘Myths Of The Near Future’, a significantly more modest 30,000 (still enough to spend a week just inside the top 10, admittedly) thought it worth parting with their hard-earned cash for the follow-up. Despite generally favourable reviews, it seemed the record-buying punters had other ideas.

Okay, so they probably took a bit too long to release a second album (three years can be a long time when you’re riding the zeitgeist, even if your nasty major label makes you re-record it), but maybe some people just didn’t ‘get’ Klaxons now that they weren’t part of any so-called scene. Maybe some people still associated them with nu-rave and the whole NME-instigated ‘hey kids!’ approach to music and consequently felt the band had nothing new to offer and bought another Kings Of Leon album instead ‘cos that was REAL music, right? Maybe some people just bought the first album to look ‘with it’ in front of their chums (y’know, the Nathan Barleys of this world).

Losers.