I'm maybe also really starting to like another band that engages in a similar sort of noise-pop struggle: the Klaxons. I saw that band when they were on their first American trip late last year, and I was a bit disappointed, mostly because they didn't sound anything like actual rave music even though their advance hype painted them as the leaders of some imagined nu-rave movement. It took a while for all the herky-jerk caterwauling of Myths of the Near Future, their debut album, to seep in, but it really got under my skin after a month or two. The Klaxons aren't fundamentally an indie-rock band; they're something fairly similar, a Britpop band in the mold of Blur circa Parklife. But they aren't satisfied with being just that, and that's why they cram their album full of half-realized literary allusions and guitar scrape-squeals and alarmist yelps. They might kick and thrash against the structures that most naturally fit them, but those structures remain intact anyway. That tension became sort of touchingly apparent on Pitchfork's Guest List feature yesterday. Asked to give his favorite songs of the past year, the Klaxons' Simon Taylor-Davis first named WZT Hearts' "1." WZT Hearts are an apocalyptically terrifying laptop-noise band from Baltimore, led by a Jason Urich, a friend of mine. WZT Hearts' early shows were total stomach-churning endurance-tests; I used to joke with Jason about how much I hated them. After a few years, they recruited a drummer and moved in a more rhythmic, tribal direction; weirdly enough, they're probably musically closer to early-90s acid-house than the Klaxons are. But "1" is still basically a near-impenetrable slab of gutwrench noise-decay, and it's pretty shocking to see an uber-hyped Britpop upstart bigging it up. Appropriately enough, Taylor-Davis also likes Deerhunter.

Here's the thing: if Deerhunter and the Klaxons played straight-up noise, I almost certainly wouldn't like them anywhere near as much as I do. A few years ago, I tried to go see Wolf Eyes at a Baltimore loft party but left hours before they started playing because opener Richard Chartier was giving me a splitting headache. And it's not like I've started feeling more forgiving about this stuff as I've gotten older; I tried listening to the new Burning Star Core album today, and I couldn't get past the nineteen-minute opening track. I really hate the vast majority of this stuff, but I like it when bands who might otherwise be playing some variation on frill-free rock pull inspiration from the structure-free lurch they hear in noise and drone music. See, there are too many rock bands releasing too much rock music; it gets really, really boring. And noise and drone musicians might be free to explore the outer edges of ugliness or whatever, but they're sort of too free, and most of the time they end up making unbearably pretentious art-wank. But when a rock band tries to play noise music, it can end up with something weirdly glorious, a damaged neon hybrid-style that digs deep into unkempt inarticulable angst without letting its scuzz get too unlistenably repulsive. TV on the Radio have long walked this line, spiking their monolithic prog with desiccated noise-blurts. The Black Dice remixes that DFA keeps releasing harness that Black Dice chaos and turn it into something you can dance to; those remixes always end up sounding better than the original tracks. And I'm anxiously waiting to hear how Bjork deploys one of her new hired hands, Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale, on Volta. This is fertile territory, the middle-ground between thrashed-out sound-vomit and structured trad-rock. Deerhunter and Klaxons are walking that line, and that line is taking them great places.