It must be nice working for the British music press, creating and inflating trends with infamous, cartoonish fervor. Take “new rave,” for instance. Klaxons crack a joke—the band’s Jamie Reynolds coined the term at in mid-’06 and has since abandoned it—and hype-heavy UK rag New Music Express runs with it, packages a tour around it, and declares it 2007’s hot new genre. Thing is, with the exception of the remixes they commission from the likes of Simian Mobile Disco, Metronomy, Sebastian, and others, Klaxons don’t make anything that approaches rave music. Instead, on their debut, Myths of the Near Future, the London trio play fairly interesting post-punk with keyboard highlights, do rock covers of a couple electronic anthems, and get their rave on only in terms of Day-glo visual aesthetics and fashion sense. It’s superficial nostalgia for the unremembered ’90s—teenagers dressing like club kids and going to rock shows—but it’s no rave.
Anybody who wanted to see rave reincarnate should’ve been at Friday night’s “My Bloody Valentine Is Shameless” party at Re-bar, where there was actual electronic dance music as well as a few people old enough to have real, if fuzzy, memories of those mid-’90s massives. Local veteran Naha, laptop battler Squid Leader, Axcys, Justin Byrnes, and MC Anton Bomb supported Brooklyn’s hyper-prolific Tigerbeat6 producer Drop the Lime. The mad projectionists of Killing Frenzy provided unsettling visuals, Burners the Space Virgins helped decorate revelers with fake blood and gore, and someone was even wearing one of those neon Aphex Twin teddy-bear suits.
The music inspired as much teeth chattering as the décor. Naha warmed things up with a set that touched on drum ‘n’ bass and breakcore, the subgenre in which Drop the Lime has done much of his work. DTL’s own set was less breakneck, focusing more on the dirty dance party electro and deconstructed pop “refixes” he’s known for. After some technical difficulties (a minute or two of no sound except in the monitors), he gleefully lived up to the threat of his “I’ll Bass You” T-shirt. But the night was less smiley-faced glowstick revival, more gritty, zombie-like persistence—the latest night out for a culture that hasn’t died but mutated.
Much credit for this night’s success is due to the Shameless crew, who continue to bring some serious, diverse talent (Modeselektor, DJ Assault) to town, working with various venues and cobbled-together sound systems to throw parties so fun they feel downright illegal all over again.
In more explicit nightlife reenactment, Saturday night’s Xtravaganza at Chop Suey was a fiercely real ball full of drag queens, banjee girls, house mothers, reading, shade-throwing, vogueing, and gaudy fashion excess (see Paris Is Burning if any of this sounds like nonsense). For a town that doesn’t much like to play dress-up, both these events were impressive displays of costumery and style.
Both Xtravaganza and “My Bloody Valentine” trace their roots to scenes of the late ’80s/early ’90s, but only the former was truly, and intentionally, anachronistic. There was nothing throwback about Shameless’s party or Drop the Lime. More rave? Yes. “New rave?” Not so much. 