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British Hype Bands Love Soft Rock, Baltimore Abstract Noize

April 26, 2007
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So we’re reading web zine Pitchfork over our morning coffee, and we open the recurring “Guest List” feature where the site gets current indie-rock hot commodities to talk about their favorite songs, video games, or flavors of Altoids, and we get smacked with this at the top of a list from Klaxons guitarist Simon Taylor-Davis in a section marked “Favorite New Songs of the Past Year”:

WZT Hearts: “1″ This blew my mind into fireworks. . . . It’s all I listened to when we toured Europe. It was just abstract being completely obsessed with this, to this then going onstage and playing three-minute pop songs, then going back to this crystal neverland.

Then again, Taylor-Davis goes on to say that Chris De Burgh’s “Lady in Red” is his favorite song of all time.

But seriously: Wait, what? The Klaxons are inescapable Britpop phenoms in their homeland at the moment (though judging by the rate of turnover for Britpop phenoms, there’s a good chance they won’t be by the time this Noise post goes up) who write, as Taylor-Davis says, “three-minute pop songs” and are hellbent on reviving Day-Glo rave while sounding like a sloppy cross between EMF, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Blur, and 2 Unlimited. (Between the Klaxons and the TMNT movie, when did 2007 suddenly become 1990?) The idea of a British electronic pop-rock band going into the studio with the tribal roar of Wzt Hearts on its mind is kinda weird, kinda exciting. If NME is suddenly touting “nü-laptop grind” in a year, Baltimore should really claim partial dibs.