Featured
Klaxons
Audio
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1. Gravity's Rainbow
Biography
In thrall to all that is brightest and best, highest and indeed lowest and most primal in British youth culture, Klaxons see no distinction between celebrating their love of the madness and melodies, the ecstasy and euphoria of early 90s hardcore rave with making some of the brightest, sharpest guitar music around today. The first single from the hotly-tipped London four piece, Gravity's Rainbow is an exuberant mix of falsetto vocals, pounding metronomic beat, thrashing bass and soaring pianos that distils all the passions energy and joie de vivre of both the rave and the moshpit.
On the flip, early 90s rave hit 'The Bouncer' gets reloaded in the Klaxons own inimitable style, part of rave culture's discarded past re-imagined as punky power pop.
Reviews
bbc.co.uk (collective) 3.5/5
Sweaty dinnerlady lookalikes, Klaxons beam fluoro optimism and magickal futurism, necking delirious happy hardcore piano lines and books by Burroughs, Ballard, Huxley and Aleister Crowley. They are peculiarly earnest ultra-nerds soundtracking a gobbledegook Utopia; a complete dumb-smart mess of stuff and great if you’re 20, blitzed off your tits, having feel-ups at the front, at uni. Three great tunes, and some Blur-alikes later they’re a million-pound brand coining it on youth’s boredom with skag rock, folk whimsy and wet indie. Klaxons serve up Day-Glo pagan ritual and pop silliness on toast, and kids get sick on it.
NME 9/10
Were you fortunate enough to be a member of Klaxons right now, you might, in the rare moments when you weren't gobbling Haçienda-strength ecstasy, start to feel slightly apprehensive about the future. "Sure," you might think, "getting dubbed the leaders of this new rave malarkey is great and all that, but being as the original rave was good for about 12 months (then got ransacked by faux-spiritual posh hippies), and that nowadays things move about 500 times as fast as they did back then (see the Arctic Monkeys' recent "demise"), I make it that we've got about, oooh... 0.125 of our 15 minutes before we're off to the great movement dustbin in the sky?"
You might think this, but luckily, the actual Klaxons are well aware that, stripped of the fluorescent clothes, "Top one! Nice one! Get Sorted!" headlines (see above) and surrounding scene of lesser bands, they would still be the best, cleverest, most melodically sophisticated and sussed British pop group in years...