Klaxons
‘Surfing The Void’
(RINSE)

It may not be ‘Chinese Democracy’ but Klaxons’ second offering, by any standards, has been a long and turbulent time coming. After three and a half years, with their original peers all but entirely forgotten, a host of scrapped material and change in producer, the nu-rave pioneers have landed themselves with an album so steeped in expectation it’d take nothing short of a masterpiece to save them from a crashing fall. And, whilst ‘Surfing The Void’ certainly finds respite in the blitzkrieg synths and crashing harmonies of old, a masterpiece it sadly isn’t. When the four-piece allow their characteristic quasi-apocalyptic tumults of sound to come to the fore (‘Surfing The Void’, ‘Flashover’) the results are as joyously unhinged as you’d hope but the album falls down when the cacophony relents; with the initial intrigue gone, the band’s tendency towards slightly cringeworthy musings on “celestial catastrophes” and “echoes from another world” are less ‘futuristic innovators’ and more Mystic Meg. ‘Venusia’ constantly pushes towards a climax that never occurs and ‘Valley Of The Calm Trees’ tries its hand at quirky psychedelia to fairly terrible effect. Whilst ‘Surfing The Void’s highs most definitely outweigh its lows, we can’t say we weren’t hoping for quite a bit more.

Lisa Wright