Klaxons
Northampton Soundhaus
How many glowsticks does it take to prop up a New Rave movement? I've lost count. There's a veritable pastel neon dawn breaking at the front of this East Midlands-ish stage. Tonight's sold-out crowd ping-pong about to fine DJs Simian Mobile Disco, waiting for a package of self-styled New Rave bands to start. In the Eighties Northampton was a goth town. Now the offspring of those goths are sporting painful fluorescent colours and blowing whistles. Oh, the irony.
On paper - specifically, the frothing pages of music weekly NME - New Rave is a rush of ear-frying hedonism currently sweeping the nation. Egged on by the air horns, housey piano synths and levels of MDMA consumption last seen with Old Rave in the early Nineties, bands like Klaxons, Hot Chip (well, sort of), Shitdisco, Datarock and others even more obscure have taken up the imperative of dance music (to 'have it') and grafted it on to a guitar-bass-drums-keyboards set-up. Cue mentalism. If it is anything, New Rave is an in-yer-face, DIY disco riposte to the sensitive indie rock touted by bands like Bloc Party.
Does New Rave really exist beyond the borders of Hoxton, London's crucible of asymmetric hair and irony? Well, yes and no. So many of the assembled tonight are waving glowsticks, those plastic squiggles previously redolent of the fag end of trance (and wearing them, and chucking them about), you're suspicious that someone from NME - this tour's orchestrators, who have much to gain from 'owning' New Rave - must have been handing them out at the door. And cackling. Did the Machiavellian low dogs at NME HQ make up New Rave in an editorial meeting one wet Tuesday? Perhaps. Nothing excites the weekly music press as much as a breaking scene. But the term itself was actually coined by tour headliners and next-year's-big-things Klaxons.
They come on tonight to the sound of air raid sirens, and launch into a spasming art-punk rendition of Kicks Like A Mule's 'The Bouncer', an old rave chestnut that goes 'If you're name's not down, you're not coming in'. It's great: funny, knowing, cacophonous, exciting. Later they'll do a guitar-heavy mangle of 'Not Over Yet', originally by Planet Perfecto featuring Grace. If they should choose to release it, it will be a hit. These covers were the foundation planks of Klaxons' smiley-faced manifesto when they declared themselves to be a 'nu-rave' outfit at their inception a year ago.
The trio of bassist Jamie Reynolds, keyboard player James Righton and guitarist Simon Taylor (joined latterly by drummer Steffan Halperin) hit upon the idea of fusing the rarefied art rock of Josef K with the cheesy pop uplift of Baby D (whose chart rave classic 'Let Me Be Your Fantasy' everyone over 25 must surely recall firsthand). Rave, the Klaxons reasoned, was the last genre left un-ingested by pop's omnivorous, recycling maw.
At first they were more schtick than flesh. But in the space of about nine months Klaxons have gone from being fringe-dwellers to bona fide sensation. They recently signed to Polydor for an undisclosed figure, after a hat-trick of singles and considerable MySpace traffic. Klaxons' debut album - Myths Of The Near Future - is due early next year.
New rave or no, the excitement around these cheerleaders for mayhem is largely justified. Their first single, 'Gravity's Rainbow' (pace Thomas Pynchon), comes on like a prog-pop landslide burying a house piano alive. It sounds even better live than it did on MTV2, where Gravity's optic nerve-frazzling video outclassed most others last summer.
Also better live is 'Atlantis To Interzone', Klaxons' attempt to out-Muse Muse with references to drowned cities and William Burroughs wedded to instruments chuntering along at warp speed. New Rave aside, there are plenty of intriguing subtexts to Klaxons, who posit in song lyrics that evil centaurs are taking over our minds. (Well, it's more thinking than the Prodigy ever did.)
Their next single is called 'Magick', and fuses an eccentric pop tune ('Do what you will,' it commands, a la Aleister Crowley) with helter-skelter propulsion. All three men chant on it, as they do on many of their songs, giving their works a blokey, rabble-rousing bent that should win them a few Hard-Fi fans. Klaxons' tall central ringleader, Jamie Reynolds, functions as a kind of menacing Pied Piper, exhorting the crowd to engage harder and faster.
As their own tunes careen along in a welter of live disco drums and mosquito keyboard noises, they lay bare Klaxons' debt to the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem and James Murphy (the man who fomented punk-funk, the forerunner of this season's guitar-dance craze). Indeed, when push comes to shove, Klaxons are rather less ravey than they are an art-punk band with melodies and go-faster stripes. Fans of Franz Ferdinand or even the Jam wouldn't be scared of a song like 'Totem'.
But to win a mass crowd over to their New Rave cult, they are going to need a lot more keyboards - the 303s or 808s of acid house, maybe - and a little more parsimoniousness: not every track requires a spaceship to land in the kitchen sink. Then Klaxons might fulfil their secret dream of becoming the KLF - the last art-pranksters to climb the charts using rave as a stepping stone.