Now that the wall between rock purism and the digital dancefloor has been reduced to mere rubble, a suite of newer, harder, brighter, faster bands are getting down to the business at hand: having a good time. In our final installment of this series, Britain’s newest illusionists, These New Puritans, conjure up Wu-Tang-inspired attack rock.

British band These New Puritans are enigmatic. Or at least they attempt to be. “We approached the band like casting a spell,” states frontman Jack Barnett. “We’re more magicians than musicians.”

Eccentricity has been a hallmark of the four-piece since they formed in 2005–and having a demonstrative pronoun in their name is just the start. The band’s hyped debut, Beat Pyramid,overflows with cryptic phrases and song fragments that are constantly repeated and referenced. When Barnett repeats the line “Every number has a meaning” on the jittery “Numerology,” he hammers home a lyrical conceit and a numeric obsession. On “Sword of Truth,” he mutters something about “riding the airwaves,” and occasionally seems to be in the middle of his own esoteric radio broadcast, uttering phrases that fall somewhere in between nonsense and coded message.

Barnett is a devoted Wu-Tang fan, and while his hometown of Southend-on-Sea is far from Staten Island, he shares the rap group’s obsession with conspiracies, double meanings, and hidden objects. At one point the band members even toyed with the idea of naming their debut album Liquid Swords, a GZA tribute that would have befitted their agressive sound: an amalgam of post-punk riffs, warning-siren synths, and jarring, shouted lyrics that Barnett describes as “attack music.”

Produced by Gareth Jones, who has worked with Wire and Liars, Beat Pyramid fashions the sounds of scraping knives and field recordings from shooting ranges into bludgeoning rhythm tracks. Post-industrial angst courses throughout in the form of snarling guitars, mechanical rhythms, and a piston-like bass lick on “En Papier.” Other tracks like “Colours” build to ecstatic crescendos, fitting into the song template established by groups like Bloc Party and Klaxons.

Initially, the album was supposed to be even weirder. Originally conceived as a tribute to London, it was going to contain field recordings from different parts of the city–when the locations were plotted on a map, the resulting shape would be an infinity sign (a reference that appears frequently in the group’s music videos). This sort of high-concept mysticism can come off as cute affectation or something more “meta,” but unlike Wu-Tang, Barnett doesn’t believe in conspiracy theories or numerology, merely viewing them as “useful ideas.”

So is there a reward for fans who sift through the album’s clues and half-truths? “They’ll achieve a spiritual calm,” says a droll Barnett. “Or not.”

Don’t Stop The Rock Part 1: Cut Copy
Don’t Stop The Rock Part 2: Does It Offend You, Yeah?
Don’t Stop The Rock Part 3: Late of the Pier
Don’t Stop The Rock Part 4: The Teenagers

For most visitors returning to Montreal’s MUTEK Festival this year, there’s an overwhelming sense that what was once a small annual gathering of chin-stroking glitch-techno aesthetes has now become an entirely different beast, not only in scale but in scope as well. That attempt to step out from behind the blue glare of laptops and break down any conventional definitions of electronic music was hardly an accident, MUTEK’s Artistic Director Alain Mongeau told us, and it’s led to a noticeable uptick in attendance and overall party atmosphere–no doubt a smart move for the festival, moving into its 10th year.

Case in point: MUTEK has been criticized in the past for ignoring its debt to Detroit techno. They’ve hosted the likes of Matthew Dear and Richie Hawtin (technically not a Detroiter) before, sure, but the style’s early innovators haven’t received much of a nod, until this year when both Carl Craig (who had to cancel his set late in the game) and Underground Resistance’s Interstellar Fugitives were booked to perform. The latter, we’re told by our moles on the inside, tore up the opening night party on Wednesday at Societé des Arts Technologique, with “Mad” Mike Banks and DJ Skurge augmenting their small, bandanna-masked crew with a vocalist, who chanted good old-fashioned Detroit techno-futurism rhetoric the way only descendants of Alvin Toffler and post-industrial cities can.

Night two’s main event at SAT paired Martin Tétrault’s high-art turntablism with crunchy, at times undanceable 4/4 techno from Chile’s Cristian Vogel, who debuted his The Never Engine live project with mixed results before Berlin’s Sleeparchive’s dense abstractions sent the thick crowd out into the darkness. Earlier in the evening, we caught more enlivening experimentalism at the Sonic Playground event at the University of Quebec’s Coeur des Sciences, where local Ben Shemie conducted an electro-acoustic performance for strings and laptop, and Martin Messier and Jacques Poulin-Denis took the idea of found-sound-meets-Office Space to the stage, outfitting themselves in bean-counter garb while mic-ing the scratches of pencils on paper and fingers on calculators.

Friday’s Nocturne evening at Metropolis brought even bigger surprises, not only for the fact that Montreal’s own scratch-master Kid Koala and turbo-crunk bass crew Megasoid drew folks from all spectra of city’s hip (and hip-hop) club scenes, but also because scalpers were selling off tickets at a premium out front. Yes, scalpers making bank at an abstract electronic music festival–hardly what the organizers might have guessed would come of their brainchild some nine years ago. Of course, headliners Modeselektor should be partly to blame, too, as they had the extremely sold-out crowd heaving and jerking until the dawning hours, with pal Pfadfinderei showering the LED walls with intense visuals and techno-simians Gernod and Szary showering the crowd with bottles of champagne. If there’s anything to take away from MUTEK 08’s first couple days it’s to forget everything you thought about MUTEK up to this moment–and start making plans for next year’s 10th-anniversary edition.