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As on Myths of the Near Future, Klaxons have created an album in Surfing the Void that should work as well in a live setting as it does coming through speakers or headphones.
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The same sort of eccentricity that sees Matt Bellamy pegged as a loveable boffin is well intact, but it's the sheer depth of the sound that drags you in like ultimate gravity. Also intact is their underlying pop instinct.
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Combining this pandemonium with a more polished finish on the cosmic pop of "Echoes" and trademark falsetto chants of "Venusia," it's safe to say Surfing the Void was worth the wait.
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With Simon Taylor-Davies' walloping guitar scree lancing through it, it also sounds distinctly like the work of four individuals who have transcended the genre-meld they spearheaded when new rave broke in 2007 and become a great British band.
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They play directly to the people willing to get swept up in a communal euphoria, and they do that very, very well.
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Q MagazineIt's thrilling stuff and a reasonable guide to where the Klaxons are heading with Surfing The Void, this dense, doomy, psychedelic album with its tough punk edge. [Sept. 2010, p. 112]
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While still somewhat leaning on their flair for creating spacey cosmic hooks, Klaxons are taking a robust step forward, allowing themselves the chance to careen a bit without running entirely off the rails.
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while Surfing occasionally fails and does so loudly, but there's something thrillingly unfashionable about how Klaxons take aim at their grayer peers with a tommy gun full of glowsticks--they don't always hit their target, but it's a gloriously fun mess all the same.
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Alternative PressJan 24, 2011The net result sounds like a band trying--and mostly succeeding--to merge their youthful past and mature present. [Feb 2011, p.87]
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This is a relentlessly exciting album--it's just that sometimes you feel it would be more rewarding to turn off the boosters, slow to a float, and take in the view with awe.
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While the likelihood of Surfing The Void achieving the same levels of critical or commercial success that Myths Of The Near Future enjoyed is debatable, Klaxons' status as one of the most confounding entities in the UK's languid music scene is cemented.
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Even Klaxons' most ominously rambunctious tracks grind out plenty of bug-eyed dream-pop chants.
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This is a creditable follow-up from a band re-establishing and confirming their status as one of UK music's more enjoyable and innovative bunch of eccentrics.
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Klaxons' ambition to stand apart from the grey indie hordes, to race by in a blur of outlandish rhetoric and pupil-dilating intensity, is admirable, but there are too many road bumps on this particular trip.
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This idealism, along with the music's sheer density and strangeness, will fascinate some--but while While Surfing the Void's admirable boldness is hard to dismiss, it's also not especially easy to like. Ultimately, it's a difficult album on many levels.
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MojoThe gap between theoretical mind-blowing freakout and actual indie underpinnings remains acute, however, as Venusia and Valley Of The Calm Trees suggest Klaxons may just be Mansun with a faster processor. [Sep 2010, p.103]
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UncutThe result can be a thrilling hybrid of Muse and Magazine, but also a bit of a dog's dinner. [Sep 2010, p.96]
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Klaxons, if you're going to shout in our ears a bunch, can you at least have something to say?
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In defence of Surfing the Void, it's certainly not an album I'd describe as 'bad' per se--it's just a massive disappointment.
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Surfing The Void unfortunately isn't a break-through or even a repeat of the past success.
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Yet whereas Myths of the Near Future was often psychotically fun, Surfing the Void finds Klaxons taking their genre rock shtick way too seriously.
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It's more or less a corporate-rock distillation of nu-rave, three years too late.
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The hooks are in short supply, and the production, as on "Flashover," overstuffed and claustrophobic. That cat photo almost saves the day, but not quite.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 22 out of 28
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Mixed: 4 out of 28
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Negative: 2 out of 28
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Aug 23, 2010
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Mar 14, 2020