Klaxons are a great band. They’re also a brutal example of how a great band can make the wrong decisions and scupper themselves. Their Mercury-winning debut album Myths of the Near Future not only captures a moment when dance, rock and pop collided to offer colourful reinvigoration for all parties, it’s also a stand-alone classic. After it they went off the rails and made a drug-addled psychedelic experiment. That is what great bands do, right? Instead of realising this, and releasing the results to intrigued bemusement – the key word being “intrigued” – they dumped it and, instead, recorded their first album again - on sonic steroids - 2010’s Surfing the Void, to little interest.
Now the zeitgeist spotlight that was briefly theirs has long moved on, their fanbase dissipated. So, do Klaxons return with all guns blazing to remind us they’re a completely unique proposition? Kind of. Love Frequency is no masterpiece but there are songs that display this London quartet’s invigorating, alternative vision for pop.
First off, their lyrics often step away from the usual pap, dipping into LSD-speak, and their vocal interaction, those punchy falsettos, are on sparkling form. The flavour, however, is electro-pop, rather than crunchy oddball indie. No problem with that, but they sometimes fly too close to a rather typical 2014 sound, somewhere between Boys Noize and Calvin Harris, On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with the likes of “The Dreamers”, a delicious amalgam of Syd Barrett-style stream-of-consciousness with Glitter Band stomp and luscious harmonies, or the instrumental “Liquid Light”, which sounds like Crystal Castles on happier drugs, or “Children of the Sun’, which is what Roy Wood might have come up with if he’d been an evangelical rave zealot rather than a Sixties hairy. There’s more too, more room for hope. The truth is you have to stick by some bands because you know that they have that oh-so-rare “it” factor. For me, Klaxons are such a band and there’s enough here to sustain that belief.
