I'm a little late to the Mercury Prize winning Klaxons' 2007 album, "Myths of the Near Future", but no matter. It's pretty great.
The fun of the record though, is not necessarily the music, but the literary references, most of which are cribbed from postmodernism's paranoid school: Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, as well as Aleister Crowley and the Mayan calendar, all get name checked, and I'm sure there are more than a few others I've missed (there must be a Lovecraft story in there somewhere!). The Klaxons bring to their music the same fun you experience reading stories of secret societies, lost civilizations, mysterious books, curses, symbols, and signs of the apocalypse only those who know can read.
As for the tunes, you can call it dance rock, or new rave, or whatever you want. It is occasionally noisy, intermittently dance-able, and sometimes the album manages to reach levels of pop greatness as on "Golden Skans" and "Gravity's Rainbow." Had I not been so slow to pick this one up it definitely would have made my '07 top ten.
The fun of the record though, is not necessarily the music, but the literary references, most of which are cribbed from postmodernism's paranoid school: Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, as well as Aleister Crowley and the Mayan calendar, all get name checked, and I'm sure there are more than a few others I've missed (there must be a Lovecraft story in there somewhere!). The Klaxons bring to their music the same fun you experience reading stories of secret societies, lost civilizations, mysterious books, curses, symbols, and signs of the apocalypse only those who know can read.
As for the tunes, you can call it dance rock, or new rave, or whatever you want. It is occasionally noisy, intermittently dance-able, and sometimes the album manages to reach levels of pop greatness as on "Golden Skans" and "Gravity's Rainbow." Had I not been so slow to pick this one up it definitely would have made my '07 top ten.
