aka they’re taking her children away because they said she was not a good mother

i suspect this is some nu-rave shit as well

from what i understand, it was actually lead singer jamie reynolds who called his band the klaxons ‘nu-rave.’ granted, it’s not entirely his fault that people at print magazines and newspapers regularly engage in severe jackassedry just to make ‘good copy.’ of course, he should’ve known better. deer do not walk up to gun barrels and say things like are you looking for a deer.

so, teenagers like the klaxons; they like to come to klaxons shows and act like moonbats and wear stripes and goggles or whatever. the klaxons make teenagers dance. this is fantastic news! what is not fantastic news, however, is that instead of getting to be a decent band, they’re going to spend the next several months as a show pony, which is evident–to me, at least–by the fact that philip sherburne says they’re already trying to shake the ‘nu-rave’ tag, a nervous realization of the light mess they’ve gotten into.

i’m not arguing that rave, something i know very little about apart from what i read in generation ecstasy (which, remember, wasn’t even its original title), wasn’t an influence on them. and i don’t have any problem with bands being rhetoricians. but the klaxons sound more like a mash between supergrass and brainiac or les savy fav or an un-shitty version of the faint than any rave music. light psychedelics, kooky lyrics about oceanic tropes, polyrhythms 101, vocal octaves: this is not a scene.

and so nu-rave is just a cousin to that other misshapen premie, ‘freak-folk’: for one, the style just had to be a reiteration of something that had already happened–even if, say, the incredible string band was just trace influence; because cyclic histories are really reassuring–even if they co-opt the vitality of the present. second, bands were reluctant to be tied into a scene by journalists who desperately wanted one to exist, and so it just hung as a pr term for a little while and withered. the artists then found space to forge their own paths: joanna’s last album was as far from folk as could be, devendra discovered the antithesis of charm, and animal collective became a really good dance band.

what ultimately depresses me, i guess, is that the press on the klaxons reminds me that there’s a huge scene void in indie music that people are trying to fill in goofy ways. that, and that an energetic, unironic, slightly weird rock band that has kids really excited warrants, post haste, a lot of shitty writing in a style section.

pt. 2 of this will be all about fall out boy’s infinity on high, which contains two songs produced by babyface and, subliminally, the sound of an entire demographic setting themselves on fire out of curiosity and then trying to put themselves out by jumping in an ocean.