The British press’ one-note (!) hype machine has cried wolf so many times over the years that Americans rarely even bother to read the headlines anymore, which may explain how the Klaxons have infiltrated our music press so innocently without even a whiff of disdain. They’ve been daubed with praise by English pens repeatedly for fronting some sort of rave revival, which makes almost no sense, given the music at hand.

Myths of the Near Future is anything but rave music. Only the bleating, grating single “Atlantis to Interzone” hints at the retro-clubland nostalgia that the English are so perpetually starved for, the silliness of the air-raid siren notwithstanding. The band itself couldn’t be more vehement in its denial of any “new rave” latency. In fact, these beats are so clunky and arrhythmic you’d be hard-pressed to trick some poor sack onto a dance-floor with them.

The production is a screeching, treble-heavy mess that precludes many of the band’s laddish chant-alongs from gaining any momentum whatsoever. The guitars are wiry and heavily affected, but not in a post-punk, angular way- just annoyingly unmelodic. The musical canvas from which this band derives its sound is alarmingly small; underneath the obnoxious production, it’s merely crude guitar-pop with a pretense of electronic doom thinly masking its dull and soulless center.

Lyrically, Klaxons fancy themselves rather literate with esoteric, high brow references to Pynchon and Proust run amok. The lyrics try so hard to sound erudite and subversive that they come off like a bad writer with a library card and a hefty thesaurus, hollering that the end is nigh. The sneering Englishness of it all falls flat because the music is so impotent and trifling beneath the brash blast of obnoxious effects discoloring its base. I couldn’t wait for it to end.

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