New Wave of New Rave

The NME are back to what they do best: genre-spotting. This time it's "New Rave". Gawd help us all. As usual, the description in no way acts as an appropriate moniker for the eclectic musical styles of groups who have been unfortunate enough to have been grouped under it.

Wikipedia has of course already started a page on this supposed phenomenon and lists some of the bands that have been grouped under the New Wave umbrella: Go Go Goatse, Lewisham Born, Lewisham Bred, Hadouken!, Shitdisco, Boys Noize, Digitalism, The Warcats, The Presets, Vitalic, Klaxons, The a2030 Crystal Castles, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Holy Fuck, Metronomy, Goose, Trashbastard, New Young Pony Club, Shy Child, Revl9n, and To My Boy.

A worldly wise John Harris casts a cynical eye over this new movement in The Guardian's Friday Film & Music section:

With the students back, parliament in session and that Killers album slowly being revealed as an overwrought dud, what better time for the greatest minds of their generation to go down the pub and invent a new genre? Cheers, then, to an apparent alliance of the NME, a few people in London's trendy E1 district and some dumb young musicians, because "New Rave" is upon us, and there is apparently no stopping it.

Simon Price seems happy to throw some logs on the fire in his review of the NME's New Wave Revolution gig in The Independent on Sunday:

Whether or not "New Rave" was initially invented by the music press in a fit of wishful thinking, it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To quote Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come. New Rave is real, and the kids love it.

The Observer's Jamie Hodgson comments on the appearance of a new breed of teenager who goes along to "underage clubs" in London:

An anthropologist might put them in the general class of indie kids, but they are loosely split into two different groups.

There are the new ravers, who listen to bands such as Klaxons and the group second on the bill today, Trash Fashion. New ravers mix and match the skinny jeans and floppy hair of the classic indie look with the fluorescent fabrics of Nineties rave culture (Day-Glo face paint and tacky plastic accessories included). None of them is old enough to have danced with 20,000 people in a field back in the heyday of rave; rather, some might have been conceived back there and then.

Then there is the look made newly fashionable by today's headliners, the Horrors, which involves a dressier version of the classic goth look. It's achieved by painstakingly rummaging for the finest Victorian-looking garms and brought to life by some ghoulish make-up and lashings of hairspray. These kids don't have a name for themselves yet, but there are certainly shades of the Cramps and early Nick Cave.

But the NME's own review of The Klaxons (the great white hope of New Wave whose audience are pictured above) dismisses them as having only 0.125 of their 15 minutes left before they're "off to the great movement dustbin in the sky".

So, let's sit back and watch our music press build 'em up and knock 'em down as they did with the Arctic Monkeys and so many before them.