270. Song No. 4,075: “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Klaxons
Myths of the Near Future, 2007

Here’s another one to for the Music I Actively Sought Out Because I Fucking Love Thomas Pynchon pile! Which I’m delighted is even a thing I can have at all.

Everything about how I found this song was completely manufactured and I love it anyway, which is a lesson that keeps reinforcing itself while the algorithms pointedly prove how easy it is to predict the kind of music I’ll like despite my musical coolness peaking two decades ago. I didn’t overhear this song in some aural chance encounter, I didn’t meet it through someone I fiercely loved and has since departed my existence, I haven’t been following this band since their wildly anonymous early days and hungrily devouring every crumb from their albums along the way. Nope, I discovered Klaxons and their literary-allusion-peppered debut album appropriately named for a collection of J. G. Ballard stories while searching for non-book-media adjacent to anything Pynchon, which I guess is still a better introduction than “Lulz, how did Spotify know I’d love this thing it recommended?” but still feels a little too inorganic for my apparently never-quite-extinct vestigial indie-rock snobbery to be okay with.

Also, this song marks a tragedy of disorganization I’ve been waiting for and am genuinely surprised it took almost the entirety of seven letters to happen: Turns out, this is the only Klaxons song that migrated over to the aged and wizened Slothrop the iPod, meaning that this project should’ve been at least 12,710 songs long. Ah well, at least my favorite track from one satisfyingly chewy, word-nerd enchanting collection of songs got enough playtime to account for a couple-three album rotations this time around.