I'm still drunk. I'm also still kind of hungover, intellectually, from the EMP Pop Conference. So my take on Klaxons' Seattle debut earlier tonight—April 23—at the Crocodile might not be entirely accurate, as I'm probably not batting my best analytical game. You'll just have to deal with it. Rock 'n' roll, etc.
First, let me say that the opening band, Fist Fite, were bullshit. The band consisted of an apparently competent drummer and a severely amateurish keyboard player/vocalist who occasionally sang or screamed but mostly pulled goofy faces. Their songs were half formed and weak (it was apparently their first show). They advertised CD-Rs for sale that weren't theirs but instead were recordings of the band they were in before this one. Brilliant.
Klaxons—now with a fourth man on drums—took the stage late, not decked out in Day-Glo but just looking like any shabby young rock band. They began their set with "The Bouncer," their cover of some obscure old rave novelty song. Maybe that means something in England. Here, not so much. To translate, the band altered the lyrics to mention Seattle. They followed with "Atlantis to Interzone," a song whose remixes I tend to enjoy more than the original, but which really lit up live. Next, the b-side "Hall of Records," with its refrain of "dance with me." There were a handful of people dancing in the front on the all-ages side of the room—the Croc wasn't sold out, and the 21+ side of the orange net was definitely more crowded—and a few believers wearing glitter and neon, but it was hardly the kind of party one might expect from the rather ludicrous phrase "new rave."
And now is as good a time as any to dive back into that old myth. Klaxons have nearly nothing to do with rave. That's fine. They aligned themselves with an aesthetic moment and some hot producers. They got saddled with these absurd expectations about third eyes and neon and glow sticks, thanks in part to their mythological-collage lyrics. But they tired of their own hype and denounced the whole thing as a joke, despite headlining an "indie rave" tour sponsored by NME back in the UK.
So what Klaxons are is a promising postpunk band, with a little bit of glam keys and falsetto and some well-written songs that didn't always work that well live.
They played "Totem on the Timeline," "Golden Skans," "As Above So Below," and "Two Receivers," but none of these quite approached the odd genius of their versions on Myths of the Near Future. As though to drive the point home, a friend wrote on my arm in ballpoint pen, "Not as good as the album." Live, the band couldn't possibly re-create their album's layered retro-futurist production (courtesy of Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford), so they aimed for urgency instead of nuance.
The band played "Magick" and "Gravity's Rainbow," both of which went over well enough. They concluded with "Not Over Yet" (another old club tune), "Isle of Her," and (I think) "Four Horsemen of 2012," although by that point I was back in the bar.
So do Klaxons live up to their impossible British-rock tabloid hype? Of course not. They're not saviors of rock or rave or anything else. They're just a young band with a knack for writing terribly catchy songs full of postmillennial apocalyptic imagery. And that's fine. It's just not the mystical paradigm shift we'd been promised. 
