These New Puritans

These New Puritans

Beat Pyramid

(Domino)

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These New Puritans seem to suffer from a “case of style over substance,” said Tom Woolfenden in BBC.com. Barely into their 20s, these Brits badly want to exude the raw, salacious energy of England’s post-punk era, which had finished before they were born. “Angular, brash, and unashamedly intellectual,” TNP is seemingly a modern clone of U.K. cult legends the Fall. Singer Jack Barnett here does his best Mark E. Smith impersonation, interrogating listeners on “Numerology (aka Numbers).” Between gnarled guitars and gurgling synths, his shouty vocals repeat “What’s your favorite number? What does it mean?” But where the Fall demonstrated audacity and a sense of urgency, TNP comes off as contrived and outdated. Though TNP is indebted to sounds of the past, the band’s “favorite topic is futurism,” said Douglas Wolk in Blender. It throws out dystopian assertions (“We’re being watched by experts”) and cryptic predictions (“Infinity is not as fast as me”). Barnett’s “sneering declarations snap like a mix-tape rapper’s flow,” and songs abrasively collide into each other. It’s pure bedlam, yet “every track contains something bold and unexpected,” said Dorian Lynskey in the London Guardian. Beat Pyramid splices punk with hip-hop, dubstep, and ominous beats. Not everything works, but “brilliance could be just an album away.”