Myths Of The Near Future - Klaxons

So here come the Klaxons, spearheading the New-Rave revival. Except they’re not. After riding that bandwagon, the band chose to distance themselves from it in the weeks leading up to the release of this debut album. Which was initially surprising when one considered the singles Magick and Atlantis To Interzone, but becomes less surprising when one considers the recent chart smash Golden Skans and, indeed, the album as a whole. Other than the incendiary Atlantis to Interzone and a, pretty dull and poor, cover of Not Over Yet there is little that can be so easily pigeonholed into the whole new rave scene.

The first impression from the album was that with the singles, the three aforementioned songs and Gravity’s Rainbow, you’ve already heard the best of the Klaxons. Take away those four songs, and what’s left is neither brilliant nor all that exciting or inventive. It just exists. Which is a shame really.

Not Over Yet may be a live favourite, but the recorded version strips away all the joyous explosion of the original and replaces it with a plodding background and dull, uninterested delivery; Isle Of Her is robotically repetitive and comes off as a worse version of Golden Skans, a trick which Totem On The Timeline repeats in respect of Magick – a similar bass line to a much less enticing effect.

So here comes the strange dichotomy of today’s hype orientated music scene. If I hadn’t heard of the Klaxons before playing this CD the chances are I would be quite impressed due to the quality of some of the songs (the singles in the real world) and would have thought that the better tracks carried the filler. As it is, I can’t help but feel disappointed that the album doesn’t live up to the heightened anticipation that some excellent singles have created.
It’s not a terrible album by any means and it does have its moments. Sadly, for me, those moments are not enough to carry the whole. In the final analysis it falls short of the heights that the singles promised, but it is still worth checking out for those great moments alone.