 The post-punk revival of the early noughties seems kind of depleted now. Gone from our download lists and dance floors are the cynical sneers and brittle blast of a music designed to agitate and berate - the kids don't want anger any more. They want fun, fluoro clothes and, ultimately, hedonism. Welcome then to the age of novelty indie hip-hop covers, a thousand varieties of electro party music and the cast of Skins.
So the post-punk revival has been quenched, but to be fair it has only itself to blame. Its cold fires were doused by a torrent of young bands content to rape and pillage their way through the old kingdoms - Gang of Four, Joy Division, Wire, The Fall - under the marching banner of influence. But plain imitation went against the revolutionary nature of the beast, and eventually left said beast declawed, toothless and pathetic, an aging paper tiger in the rain. As you might expect, this disappointed the very people to whom post-punk was meant to matter most: the youth.
Admittedly, it wasn't all bad. For a while there, the reawakening of post punk's typically barbed guitars and icy, staccato drums did give us one or two promising bands. Thing is, none of them - the once-ubiquitous Bloc Party included - are doing much of interest today. But there's another twist in the tale still to come, because just as you were thinking that Vampire Weekend and their happy Hamptons mbaqanga were the shape and sound of the near future, along come Southend quartet These New Puritans, with their debut LP Beat Pyramid. And they've taken this whole sore and sorrowful post-punk thing in a whole new direction.
In truth, TNP have been around for ages: gigging, releasing the odd single, looking impossibly mysterious at festivals and events up and down the country, even soundtracking a Dior Homme fashion show at the behest of the label's former design chief (and London scene mythologiser) Hedi Slimane. But it's taken till now for them to get their debut album out of their heads and onto the shelves. Listening to it, it's easy to see why.
This is not just another album from a new wave/no wave UK fashion band, peppered with danceable singles and padded out with some vague, bets-hedging guitar filler. In fact, this is not just another album, full stop. This is a moment, a monument - a musical construct so tightly and obsessively built that, on first listen, it should all seem a bit much to take in. The fact that it doesn't is due to the nature of what's being created, something at once artificial and primally natural. Colossal, consequential, complicated, but - like the human genome or a rainforest ecosystem - made up of such a perfect intricacy of interplays that it operates and exists with the simple clarity of cut-glass. It's a tremendous achievement for a band to produce something so intimate, so open, so inspired and (presumably) so arduous in the making at such an early stage in their career. It is by no means perfect, but it is perfectly exciting. And not in a Klaxons 'hyperspeed hooray' sense, either.
The album opens with the brief, woozy introductory wash of ...Ce I Will Say This Voice, but in truth - and as you'll find out 33 minutes later - that's really the ending of a previous dream, rather than the beginning of this one. The action proper actually begins with track two, Numerology (AKA Numbers), as a rubbery electronic bass drum looms threateningly, snares and hi hats urging it on like pilot fish at the mouth of a predatory shark. Neurotic guitar rills cascade and crescendo behind front man Jack Barnett's estuary intonations, simultaneously deadpan and desperate. 'Every number has a meaning', he assures us - an inscrutably witchy lyric and one which points to what's coming. Jack has some rather out-there interests, and Beat Pyramid often seems like an induction or initiation into them.
Similar elements are at play across the next two tracks, Colours and Swords of Truth, as tense vocal melodies and merciless rhythms climax in scenes equally reminiscent of an art student house party in Elephant & Castle and a Satanist orgy in Huysmans' The Damned.
The superb percussion - programmed or live - towers in the centre of each track like a biblical pillar, around which a complex scaffold of guitars, bass, synths and voices is erected piece by piece. As the album progresses, sounds, lyrics and motifs dissolve and recur like strange dreams, the cut-and-paste approach to arrangements, structures and sequencing once again calling to mind arcane rituals and ancient rites, a logic divorced from modern day rationality but possessed of its own, more mystical, power. The Beat Pyramid of the album's title is surely no slice of 'new grave' whimsy - here is a frantic, geometric, rhythmic musical monolith, the secrets within which stir the most antique of instincts into life. It sounds incredibly pretentious, but that's the impression the album gives as you listen. It's as though you're hearing dance music at its most essential, and in fact as a sonic illustration of human abandon, human exhibition - hedonism even, hello Skins! - Beat Pyramid is not easily bettered.
Moving on, we reach the heart of the construct, and the pace slows momentarily with the Flaming Lips-y bass insinuations of Doppelganger, but thereafter we're hurtling forwards again, through the proclamatory/declamatory fury of C.16th ± and the eerie (if slightly more generically art punk) single En Papier. The end of the record is a riot of sparsity and severity often reminiscent - especially on £4 - of minimalist techno, and lightened (just) by live favourite Elvis and Navigate-Colours, where the flytrap-ruthless melodies of the stand-out early tracks are matched or mirrored in a somewhat softer context.
If there's a weak spot it's Mkk3, where suddenly the lyrical content starts to make more obvious sense. As a brief tale of small-town angst and isolation, it's interesting, but its openness sits uncomfortably among the more obscure and purely expressive songs around it. The record goes on to finish with I Will Say This Twi..., and the troubled dream leaves us back where started - emerged from the pyramid you might say, having witnessed much more than we'd expected. But it's penultimate track Costume that reiterates to us the truth of what we have heard: that TNP know, whatever avenues they choose to explore, exactly how much to give - and how much to keep to themselves. The tension in that balance, surely, is as post-punk as it gets. The difference between TNP and other bands ranged beneath the post-punk flag is that TNP, with their ambition and intensely personal vision, have done the genre a favour - rather than the other way round.
"Beat Pyramid" is out now on Angular records.
http://www.myspace.com/thesenewpuritans
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