Klaxons’ Second Album Shelved – Economic Meltdown To Blame?

It’s revealed in the new issue of the mag that Klaxons have been asked by their label to re-record their second album. The songs they handed in, apparently, were too dense and psychedelic, too challenging.

The band themselves are putting a brave face on this. “We made a really heavy record and it isn’t the right thing for us, I understand that,” said Jamie Reynolds, explaining that being sent back to the drawing board has forced him to remember that Klaxons are “first and foremost a pop band”.

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But are they the victims of undue record company pressure? With the industry, and the wider economy, in such turmoil, it’s tempting to imagine that Polydor have panicked, and – with their quarterly results in mind – hastily nixed an album that may well be more of a cult concern, a grower, than a dazzling fount of radio hits.

Judging by the songs that have surfaced live so far, it looks as though Klaxons are (or were) feeling their way towards a more frantic, math-rock, Battles-type sound. That said, you can still detect definite tunes, no less immediate or graspable than, say, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. It’s hardly ‘prog’ in the preposterous, ‘King Arthur On Ice’ sense.

Here’s ‘Moonhead’:

And here’s ‘Calm Trees’ (or possibly ‘Valley Of The Calm Trees’):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuLOGMHsu5k

Other new tracks the band debuted at Madame Jojo’s last month, ‘Imaginary Pleasures’ and ‘In Silver Forest’, are not available online – but I don’t remember thinking they sounded especially difficult, or even much of a radical departure from the last album.

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But as album sales continue to fall, and record labels become necessarily more conservative in what they put out, is this kind of paranoia a taste of things to come?

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