These New Puritans - "Beat Pyramid"

These New Puritans - Numbers (Domino 2008)

These New Puritans - Beat Pyramid / Domino

So here's a funny story: I saw that Times New Viking record Rip It Off lying among a pile of scattered records on the floor of WLUW's music department, you know the one, and having just recently read about how good These New Puritans was, I was pretty certain it was the same thing. Rip it off, beat pyramids, very close as you can see. But I definitely just popped it in and realized, whoops! This isn't the record I wanted to review. I was thinking something a little more... Wirey. Fally. PiLy.

But this is 2008 (February already?) and as we like to say around here at Audiversity, fuck the haters. So this won't be about Times New Viking and their lo-fi love, but rather a very different story full of sharp guitar tones and unexpected harmonies emerging from the discordance of jittery rhythms and deadpan deliveries. This is the distinctly British beauty of These New Puritans.

You might be aware that the record is coming out on Monday in the UK and on March 18th in the US. I mean, they're on Domino. They've got Tim Goldsworthy remixing them already. They've worked with Hedi Slimane for a Dior Homme show. It's like if Interpol actually cared about keeping up their fashionista image and wasn't so concerned about making the great leap forward of using more than three colors in album art. Gasp! Guffaw! But fuck the haters, we're not here to talk about Interpol either.

Unfortunately, These New Puritans tend to invite these kinds of comparisons. They tread a minefield of musical influences that have the fiercest critics and the most ambitious of music fans calling out every name they can recall from the Factory roster from 1978 to 1982. Yet, at the center of it all, the men play the cards close to their collective chests by shunning the influences question and namechecking dubstep or the Wu-Tang instead.

It's not for nothing as this doesn't play like your average post-punk record. It's got the sound, the crisp plucks and vaguely dancey beats and enigmatically anthemic choruses. But it has something else: A willingness to not fall into 4/4 propulsion by default and a self-awareness of when to quit. So while Jack Barnett's vocals on "Infinity Ytinifni" are mostly monotone, it only takes 2 minutes and 24 seconds for the song to play out to its logical conclusion. Not one of these songs sounds tired at the end of it; in fact, in many cases you find yourself wishing there were more to it than just... I mean, was that really it? Just when it was getting so good...

The closest ancestor to Beat Pyramid is thus Wire's Chairs Missing. The record isn't quite a full nod to far-out experimentation, but it's also not barebones punk incognito. Two decades later, These New Puritans have captured the gray transition that Wire were in their first incarnation, experimenting with synths and other new technologies while still maintaining that "We'll go until we don't like it anymore" attitude that makes these bands so endlessly fascinating even to people who can't necessarily enjoy them. It's the ethos, the work ethic behind the musical detours, that makes post-punk so challenging and so loved even now (It's also producer Gareth Jones, who's worked with Wire before). These New Puritans fit in the same frame of mind by having the listenable moments ("Numbers," "Costume," a host of others) mesh seamlessly with the less listenable ones ("Colours," "£4," etc.) for a cohesive experience.

And cohesive is really the buzz word for this band. They didn't require any time to come together as The Nein did before Luxury dropped jaws last year. The Southend-on-sea quartet have arrived fully formed and dressed to impress. 2008, the year of the "T'-word New Somethings? These New Puritans have made their case, anyway. If they wind up like Clinic, at least we can say we remembered when Beat Pyramid bowled us over like... Well, you can drop your own Super Bowl reference here. I'll be over there hogging the chips and dip. Every number has a meaning, man. 42.