Future shock

The British band Klaxons. From left, James Righton, Jamie Reynolds and Simon Taylor-Davis. (Universal Music Canada)

A klaxon is a shrill electrical sound, typically triggered as a warning signal. For the last year, the British music press has been creating just such a din about London’s Klaxons. Known for their bold melodies and supernatural imagery, this ferocious three-piece band has received the gushing sanction of the New Musical Express (NME), the influential UK music paper that has become a more enthusiastic promoter of England than the British Tourist Authority.

Klaxons’ debut album, Myths of the Near Future, was released in North America on March 27. In January, a NME review gave it nine out of ten and proclaimed the album “has the anatomy necessary to change the course of a generation.” It’s classic NME hyperbole — exultant and nonsensical — but one thing’s for sure: Klaxons are pushing the limits of pop music and the results, at least thus far, have been sublime.

Like their countrymen the Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons have enjoyed a sudden rise to renown. James Righton and Simon Taylor grew up around Stratford-Upon-Avon (the birthplace of Shakespeare); while studying fine art at Nottingham University, Taylor made a drunken, late-night pact with Jamie Reynolds to form a band. Righton, 23, Taylor, 24, and Reynolds, 26, only started playing together in November 2005, but by April ’06, their first singles were winning superlatives from critics. Unlike many fledgling bands, Klaxons had a very clear idea about how they should sound.

“When we started, there were a lot of post-punk groups, [using] off-kilter high-hat, lots of guitar chords — a lot of bands playing songs without actual tunes. We wanted strong melodies with escapist lyrics,” Righton says during a recent phone interview from London.

Tuning out pop radio, the band members turned to artists such as Brian Eno, the KLF, New York noise rockers Liars and ELO for inspiration. Myths of the Near Future sounds appropriately alien when compared with recent U.K. exports such as Franz Ferdinand or the Arctic Monkeys. The record has the urgency of punk and the sophistication and scope of progressive rock —  Klaxons manage to cram a lot of music into the three-minute pop format.

Myths of the Near Future takes its name from a short story by British writer J.G. Ballard, and makes sly references to William S. Burroughs, French writer Alfred Jarry and British occultist Aleister Crowley. It’s been a while since a band was so brazen about its love of science-fiction — the cosmic ramblings of progressive-rock bands like Yes and Rush did much to taint the genre.

(Universal Music Canada)

Klaxons take a more elusive approach. Like the prose of Thomas Pynchon — another of the band’s literary references — Klaxons’ lyrics are compelling because they only hint at menacing plots, never fully explaining them. In Atlantis to Interzone, Reynolds spins the following narrative: “Your dead man half-alive who hangs from helping numbers 1, 2, 5 / His ears pricked with their knife hears that the east are coming, west are coming / From Gravity’s Rainbow, the axis here is still unknown / The children’s faces glow / The wasteland guides them, wasteland guides them.”

Sci-fi has typically been a means of addressing contemporary ills through an imagined future. For Klaxons, it was a way of providing listeners with some sophisticated escapism. “It’s more about dipping into literary references,” Righton says, “getting things into pop music that shouldn’t be in pop music – or things that you hadn’t seen in pop music for a long time.”

Part of the band's escapist plan was to create unforgettable videos. Almost all of them have been shot by director Saam Farahmand, who Righton claims “has the best understanding of our music.” The clip for Golden Skans is a celestial tableau: Swathed in brightly coloured ribbons, the band members orbit and smash planets made of glass. Magick is even more sinister. The video toys with the idea of stigmata; one of the band members is overcome by a malevolent force that escapes through his eyes in a messy, phosphorescent stream.

“It’s a very dark song, and [Saam] thought it needed a dark video,” Righton says, claiming the clip almost got banned from MTV for its graphic nature. (Odd, really, when you consider the video features no nudity, no blood, just … weirdness.) “We don’t want to make videos of us f---ing around, playing around with a super-8 camera in a field. We like to be challenging.”

Dance music has had an enormous influence on Klaxons. The chorus to Atlantis to Interzone, one of the band’s earliest compositions, features a jagged, propulsive bass line, sampled female vocals and air horns — all over a furious beat. A favourite live cut is their bratty cover of The Bouncer, a 1992 dance anthem by the British duo Kicks Like a Mule. Early on, Reynolds dubbed Klaxons’ sound “new rave” — rave referring to the emergence of the acid house movement (est. 1988), which took Chicago house music and made it psychedelic. This buoyant period gave rise to British artists including the Orb, the Shamen and 808 State; all-night dance parties in warehouses or the great outdoors; and drugs like ecstasy.

Reynolds’s tag quickly assumed a life of its own. NME got behind it, sponsoring the Indie Rave Tour, which featured Klaxons, as well as bands such as the Sunshine Underground, New Young Pony Club and Shitdisco. Without prompting, fans showed up in garish day-glo outfits. Before long, the new-rave look became fashionable. Meanwhile, the band that coined the term grew cagey about it — the more ubiquitous new rave became, the less Klaxons liked it.

“The term itself is pretty misleading, and has negative connotations that you don’t really want. If you look at the band and see the term, you think glowsticks, pills and people out of their minds on drugs,” Righton says. Then there’s the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, a British law that effectively banned raves. (In one of the most comical elements of the law, legislators demonized the music as “predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” — an apt description of any popular music since, oh, 1890.) 

“Rave’s a pretty funny period – there wasn’t a lot of great music, but there were a few great songs,” Righton says. “I liked the playfulness of it. A lot of it was good-natured, it wasn’t an angry genre, not an angry period of time, very celebratory.”

Klaxons haven’t disowned new rave — they’d be foolish to deny its marketing potential — but they refuse to be defined by it. “We wanted to make a good record, taking in lots of influences,” Righton says. “People have sometimes complained, ‘Why isn’t The Bouncer on the record?’ We wouldn’t have done that. We’re an organic band that plays experimental, weird pop music.”

Klaxons play Toronto on April 8 and Vancouver on April 22.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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