Vancouver post-punk trio The Zaxons return October 26 with a new video for “Adrian Knows,” a standout from their current album Videopticons. Built around driving bass, clipped guitar lines, primitive electronics and Julian Growcott’s coolly detached British vocal, the track lands somewhere between the angular economy of Wire and Magazine, the nervous futurism of Pete Shelley and Gary Numan, and the darker pulse of contemporary bands like Preoccupations and Women. It’s sharp, strange and immediately melodic, the kind of pop song where every hook arrives with a little exposed wiring around it.
That balance runs throughout Videopticons. Growcott (guitar/vocals), Dave Charan (bass/vocals) and Ben Wilson (drums/synthesizer) make lean, restless post-punk built from rhythm first: basslines that push songs relentlessly forward, guitars that slash across rather than sit comfortably inside them, and synths that occasionally flicker into view like some obsolete machine suddenly waking up. The reference points are recognizable, but The Zaxons never settle comfortably into revivalism. This is less the 1980s remembered than the strange technological future that era imagined was just around the corner. If Videopticons exists anywhere, it might be after closing time in a British electronics shop somewhere around 1981. The televisions are still glowing, a home computer has been left running in the corner, and tomorrow looks simultaneously exciting and faintly ominous. It’s a world The Zaxons suggest rather than recreate, all clipped efficiency, malfunctioning signals and flashes of pop colour against the grey.
“Adrian Knows” is one of the record’s most immediate transmissions. Growcott’s vocal melody pulls the song forward while Charan’s bass does much of the heavy lifting underneath, driving against guitars that seem to arrive from odd angles rather than simply decorating the chords. The song has the precision of early post-punk but also something more physical and contemporary in its attack. It’s tight, propulsive and catchy, but never entirely domesticated. Julian Growcott says “Adrian Knows” takes its name and inspiration from Adrian Mole, the painfully self-conscious teenage narrator of Sue Townsend’s 1982 novel The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾. “It’s about being introverted and socially useless in school and dealing with the typical entitled, bigoted, and narcissistic students and teachers of that era,” he explains. The accompanying video extends that perspective into an homage to 1970s and ’80s Vancouver, seen through the eyes of a kid beginning to figure out the people around him and finding solace in the city itself. Those spaces also become a doorway into books, art, music, architecture and film, another way of making sense of the world.
That tension between melody and abrasion runs through all eight tracks on Videopticons. “Keswick Cutouts” opens with an urgent low-end pulse and buzzing electronics; the title track sinks deeper into nocturnal British post-punk; “Mumpsimus” bends brighter melodies into stranger shapes; and “Television Play” closes the record in a haze of sludgy bass, haunted guitar and distorted-media atmosphere. At times the synths carry the primitive glow of an early home computer; elsewhere the band sounds closer to a darkened room with the rhythm section turned up too loud. Hooks appear everywhere, but The Zaxons rarely leave them alone for long.
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Critics have picked up on that frequency. Dancing About Architecture heard The Jam’s urgency, Cure-heavy basslines and C86 jangle across the record, while describing “Adrian Knows” as a punkier, mathier detour into college rock. Obscure Sound praised the album’s post-punk precision, nocturnal synths and driving rhythm section, drawing a line to The Chameleons, while Bored City described Videopticons as post-punk filtered through obsolete media, full of wiry guitars, buried vocals and the atmosphere of old public television and early home computers. “Adrian Knows” has repeatedly emerged as a highlight, singled out for its vocal melody, shifting arrangement and the band’s ability to hide memorable hooks inside stranger structures.
There is a distinctly British current running through The Zaxons, but the band belongs equally to a modern post-punk continuum. The fractured guitars of Women, the mechanical propulsion of Preoccupations and the darker intelligence of Protomartyr feel as relevant here as anything pulled from the original post-punk era. The Zaxons occupy their own point along that line: three musicians making lean, bass-driven pop music that is catchy enough to pull you in and strange enough to keep revealing new corners. With the new “Adrian Knows” video, Videopticons flickers back onto the screen. Somewhere between yesterday’s vision of tomorrow and the considerably messier future that actually arrived, The Zaxons are still transmitting.
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