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The streets of London that were once paved with gold have, according to Alan Donohoe, lost their sheen and to traverse the capital's music scene is “like wading through a swamp of shit”. Not an entirely fair point, but one straight to the point and one made when The Rakes decamped to Berlin to record their third album.
Although spawned like so many others from the East London punk scene, The Rakes have arguably outgrown the typecast mould of their peers. After all, not many can lay claim to name checking Hermann Joseph Muller’s theory of evolutionary genetics (‘Muller’s Ratchet’) in just over three minutes. But more than the success of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction, ‘Klang’ illustrates that The Rakes have upped the ante as far as their unpolished strut is concerned, successfully making good on the raw assurances of their debut ‘Capture/Release’.
An album of instant gratification, exploratory intuition and adventurous progression, the endemic energy of ‘That’s The Reason’, ‘Shackleton’ and album forerunner ‘1989’ entrench the album in mundane excess and humdrum escapism with sex, fags and booze all playing fitting and recurring bit parts. Like all good guitar grounded offerings the noise is self-evident (‘You’re In It’), the gang mentality unobtrusively omnipresent (‘The Final Hill’), the bass-lines tight (‘The Light From Your Mac’) and the drums urgent (‘The Loneliness Of The Outdoor Smoker’). Combine this with the immediacy of a bipolaristic vocal slur which brings to life a stream of lyrical consciousness and carries like the running commentary of A. N. Others internal monologue and ‘Klang’ manages to distance itself from a plethora of potential parallels.
More than a redundant and rusting staple of the humble garden shed - a rake is a recklessly wasteful, wildly extravagant and morally lacking person - and ‘Klang’ in parts reflects this latter definition through the short, sharp, riotous release of social observations that it offers. Playing to their improved strengths and clocking in at just shy of thirty minutes, The Rakes prove the theory that less is sometimes definitely more.
