These New Puritans "Navigate, Navigate" (MP3)

Been burned too many times by the NME hype cycle to give a group of jittery British youngsters a break? Sucks for you, poncho. The tabloid hyperbole averse have likely failed to notice that pasty Southend teens, These New Puritans, have been putting strummy blog bands to shame with only a few crumbs of stateside recognition for their effort. Last year's terrific vinyl only Now Pluvial EP fused together the barking incoherence of the Fall with the twitchy incoherence of early Liars songs. Now, on only their second proper release, the kids have dropped the easily identified touchpoints and gone off the deep end entirely.
Spanning an audacious 12 and a half minutes, "Navigate, Navigate" is not the work of a polished young band, so much as a wildly ambitious one. Not content to spread their ideas out over the greedy runtime, vocals constantly overlap and interrupt each other, rendering everything an extremely messy but nearly harmonic jumble. The magic trick here is that there aren't any big structural changes as the song progresses; there's similar guitar scrapes coming and going and the same brittle drumbeat throughout. All that happens is that the pieces subtly slide to recombine in an ever changing pattern, but it's magnetically compelling anyway. Twelve minutes of skittish beats and impenetrable bleats, held together with nothing but patches of empty space. Yet, it rules.
When these kids really crack song structure, there's gonna be some serious trouble.