Klaxons - Echoes

Pioneers of the New Rave genre that never was, Klaxons are back after three years and one scrapped album. Thankfully, the threatened prog material hasn’t surfaced, but clearly the experience has matured them - gone is the frenetic, wham-bam-thank-you-Yamaha attack of the likes of ‘Atlantis to Interzone’, to be replaced with an altogether more focused, channelled energy. If this was Robot Wars, then the targeted aggression of Chaos 2 has won out over the havoc of Hypnodisc.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Klaxons have tried to sail calmer waters: ‘Golden Skans’ being their most notable effort to date (the less said about album filler ‘Isle of Her’ the better.) But although ‘Golden Skans’ was (bafflingly - though I suppose they had to justify the hype somehow) NME’s Single of the Year 2007, ‘Echoes’ comfortably surpasses its predecessors. It may seem like damning them with faint praise, but here Klaxons comprehensively out-Delphic Delphic.

Whether the decision to scrap the previous material was made by the band or their label, we’ll probably never know, but the decision to aim for the charts rather than bludgeon and bluster their way there via the ‘wacky’ Skins generation has resulted in their most focused single to date.