From the desk of:

Klaxons. Live. My Take on it.

The Klaxons.  If you haven’t heard of them or read about them then you friend, you are in a dark and sad place.  They’ve been on the covers of magazines, displays at the big box retailer, and all over iTunes.  These NME darlings recently stormed the US with a tour that kicked off at Studio B in brooklyn and triggered a torrent of blog posts and downloads.  I’ve read so much about how much energy they have and how the cd translates really well into a live show — so I stopped by Seventh Street Entry last week to check them out.

I really can’t think of a better local venue to see a loud british rock band than Seventh Street Entry.  It was hot, it was crowded, it was very small, and very loud — and this is exactly how I would design it if I knew bands like The Klaxons were going to play there.  The energy of the crowd was insane.  A small group of younger kids in the front were enjoying dancing around, the really drunk guy standing next to me was content to stop jumping up and down to grope his girlfriend every once in a while, and the older kids near the back were drinking like madmen and foreshadowing their spillage down onto the floor to drunkenly sway around and then trade punches with each other.  This was a rare show for me — I wasn’t drinking, wasn’t drunk, and had a pair of sober eyes to observe the entire mess with.

The band seemed to feed off of this energy.  They were very chatty with the intimate crowd — posing for pictures — answering questions that were shouted out (“What Do you think of the USA?”  “Fucking way better than the UK.”) and jumping off of things as they played.  It was an ideal situation for a show and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire atmosphere.

Here’s where things go south, however.  The show was $12 (expensive at the entry) and listed on the calendar was TBD for an opening band.  When I showed up I was optimistic that they would have a solid local opener, so I was pretty dissappointed that they had substituted a house DJ to play the set before the band went on.  Once the band did come on they played a really short 45 minute set with no encore.  I guess they stuck around and hung out to meet fans afterwards, but I still felt slightly taken advantage of.  They could have tacked in a few cover songs or an extended jam and I would have left feeling much better about the whole transaction.

The other thing that was bothering me during the entire set was the obvious influence of The Libertines on this band.  (Let’s not get all huffy here, readers — I understand that the libertines came from oasis, oasis from the smiths, the smiths from the velvet underground, etc…. that’s a different post altogether.  just be patient and see where I’m headed with this.)  These days it seems like every NME band is trying to jump on the flavor that was invented by The Libertines by way of Oasis, by way of the Doors.  This involves wild shows, sloppy guitar playing, improvised vocals, and chemicals.  Lots of chemicals.  But the Klaxons look to be about 17.  They were all drinking red stripe throughout the show, but I didn’t see any of them actually finish one.  They just nursed them the entire time, and then flailed around and bounced off of things and played their guitars all sloppy like they were at the end of a 9 day bender.  They weren’t.  The music couldn’t vary too drastically from the plan or they would have gotten out of synch with their sampler (that pretty much served as a prettier click track) to keep them all together.  They vocals were awful, their harmonies could have been invented in a shower or a speeding car, and their technical abilities on their instruments were just embarrassing.  I overheard a younger girl comment about how cool it was that they were constantly switching instruments and I wanted to grab her, shake her, and just explain that if you were going to play one or two notes throughout a 3 minute song — it didn’t matter if you were playing an accordion or a tambourine — it would be easy enough for anyone to master.

Their live set on the Current from earlier that day confirms that.  Without the wild dancing, alcohol, sweaty, packed, hot crowd — these guys would pretty much just be a regular garage band that crossed an ocean and ended up with shoes too big for them to fill.  You hear that Brooklyn?  YEAH?   Good.  Then we can go ahead and backlash this shit real fast, thanks.

Klaxons – It’s Not Over Yet
Klaxons – Golden Skans
Klaxons – As Above, So Below

Thanks to The Smudge of Ashen Fluff for the mp3s.  I’ve done the right thing and hosted them myself, but where credit is due credit is given ’round these parts.

Next we’ll get to something somehow related.   I haven’t finished how to draw the link yet, but I saw Modest Mouse on 4/20 and Isaac was as sober as sober could get for the entire set.  It made me miss the Modest Mouse I used to see when he would drink at least a bottle and a half of Jack Daniels before he even went on stage.   His band mates seemed much happier with this Isaac, however.  Much happier.