The Crystal Axis

The Crystal Axis is Midnight Juggernauts' second album - their first since Dystopia launched the Australian trio into a vortex of global intrigue. For those who arrived late, Andrew Szekeres, Vincent Vendetta and Daniel Stricker had pursued an organic course through multiple indie EPs, singles, and retro-futurist videos before they found themselves hailed as de facto pioneers of a perceived new frontier of "indie-dance" circa 2007/08. But the infinite unknowns of musical imagination will always make light of such musty generic pigeonholes. "We've always seen ourselves as a band that continues to push itself and evolve," says Vincent. "We could see that the scenes we'd been linked with had crossed over to larger audiences - and that's great. We could easily have made more music in that vein, but for this time round we decided to take a more unpredictable path, to explore a few new tangents." Ground zero for The Crystal Axis was live experimentation - the Juggernauts were bristling with the kind of intuitive performance chemistry that demands spontaneous creativity. In early 2009, they wired themselves into a house on a remote stretch of coastal New South Wales. Surrounded by synths, keys, guitars, drums, racks of pedals, and other electronic and percussive flotsam and jetsam (not to mention the constant lapping of the sea and complete isolation), the writing process immediately took on a life of its own. From the opening drum roll of the overture, "Induco," to the hypnotically spiraling "final goodbye" of "Fade to Red," The Crystal Axis is an album that relentlessly forges its own path. As previewed in the dramatic lead single, "This New Technology," and now though the sheer pop exuberance of second single "Vital Signs" - The Crystal Axis constantly veers from percussive, hypnotic grooves to luxuriant jams via rich Morricone-esque textural diversions, walls of sound, and 70s AM melodic forks to map a fifty minute symphony of synth-rock invention. Thematically, the trip finds lyrical parallels in the urgent pressures and inbuilt failings of human mortality juxtaposed against the limitless possibilities of "The Great Beyond." The ominous implications of "Cannibal Freeway" are balanced by the airborne optimism of "Dynasty"; the sheer pop exuberance of "Vital Signs" by the unsettling strangeness of "Lemuria."