Klaxons -
Echoes
"Surfing the Void", the album, is kind of hard to rate. On one hand the album is good, most songs are nice enough to be keepers and i apreciate the early-arctic-monkey-esque sound of some songs and even the occasional Muse wierd spacey sounds. But in context, it sounds like the band sold their soul to
THE DEVIL and got another go at making a more commercial
"Myths of the Near Future". It's basically the same style, except in Myths they could afford to experiment a bit, give a bit more variety to the album. This is the reason i can't listen to many songs on
Surfing the Void in a row, they sound like one of those 30 minute space rock prog songs. And even tho i like all the wall of sound/shoegazey thing i think they overused it a bit. Taken individual the songs are very nice tho, almost all of them have some simple, "epic", grand, easy to remember chorus. Dunno about you, but too many such songs in a row is a bit too much for me. Anyway the album is good, and it will hopefully revive this almost dead (?) genre (new rave).
Oh also it has a very cool album cover: