These New Puritans - Beat Pyramid

MOGstars 8/10Bland, uninspired and identikit — charges often levelled at the slew of indie lad bands endlessly emerging from the peripheral towns of this sceptered isle. Yet Southend’s These New Puritans can hardly be accused of being any of these things, as they throw together the repetitive and experimental edge of dance music with the fury of almost bestial post-punk, producing a fractured and dystopian album that charts an uneasy course between inspired brilliance and insipid pretension. A quick glance at the sleeve of this debut offering leans towards the latter. The kaleidoscopic and metallic cover, the unordered track-listing, complete with what are presumably the song titles in Arabic and splintered sleeve notes point firmly to a band that have set off to find the future of music but have got lost up their own rear-ends. Indeed, opening track "…Ce I Will Say This Voice" only confirms this image, treating us to little more than murmering bass and the latter half of a sentence, slurred in a sultry Mediterranean accent.Venturing into "Numerology," the boundary between brilliance and mediocrity still isn’t clear. Minimalistic beats and machine gun guitars make you think of the archetypal dance music nerds; you can almost visualise the girl they are trying (failing) to impress with pseudo-intellectual, English major poetry. But then something strange happens. A soaring chorus rises from the confusion, followed by the greatest 1-to-10 count up since the Violent Femmes. Suddenly the mavericks are vindicated, and the experiment hits upon the brilliance it was searching for.In many ways, this opening acts like the album in miniature: a disconcerting start emerging into a triumph. It is in the latter half of the impressive 16 tracks that the real standouts come. Lead single "Elvis" is perhaps the most traditionally musical and most expansive track on the album. Taking up where New Rave-mates Klaxons left off, this seems a song equally suited for playing at home as in the club. Here the lyrics are imbued with substance as well as style, shouts that will make you think as much as they make you dance, while drums, synths and guitar coalesce into an impressive musical melee before falling back into a subdued humming.Slower number "Mkk3" elevates the same ideas to an even higher plane. Growling bass and chiming guitar provide a toned down backdrop to the most lyrically expansive song, a stream of consciousness that even invokes a masturbating Michael Barrymore, but juxtaposed with the most honest description of this album: “I’m off my face/ Out of it and loopy." The impact of all this is heightened as the track slams into an abrupt stop, recovering gently through "4" (four seconds of silence) and the flickering electro power-up of "Navigate/Colours."Beat Pyramid is an album that tends to veer between a number of paths. At one extreme it is the pretentious output of art school drop-outs, the sort of album that would be lauded on The Culture Show and “experienced” by coffee sipping conceptual artists; numerical themes run through the album, and at times it verges on the unlistenable, its experimentation becoming a little too strong for the normal music fan. In other parts it seems a bit like the worst of high school bands, an uneasy melange of noise produced by people far less complex than they think they are. Yet at other times it seems custom-built for the dingy indie disco, basslines that will shake the nicotine stains of the ceilings, and riffs which would seem equally suited to Britrock banner wavers Arctic Monkeys. However, it is when all these aspects come together that These New Puritans sound best.Unafraid to push boundaries, their musical bravery at times becomes foolhardy, but an ever-present pop sensibility serves to rein this in, and also stops artistic delusions from turning this record into latter-day prog-rock. The record may not appeal to everyone, but as the same sultry voice returns in the final track to finish (or rather begin) what she started, we can’t help but be thankful for a band that tries to step out of the comfort zone a little.