It seems like the UK can't help itself from spitting out, or being spit up on by, this year's iteration of punk's young Turks. They're addicted to a contrived and paradoxically formulaic version of an unconstrained sense of the new. To that end, youth is jettisoned out into the workaday performance world faster than you can read an article about how Arctic Monkeys are changing music forever.

Enter These New Puritans, a Southend, UK band of 19 year olds that every nation now has a version of (the Born Ruffians hail from these parts). Their dance punk chants, echoed guitars and steady backbeat should be plainly recognizable for their Gang of Four ape, if not the staggering fifteen minute run time which, here, truly stretches an otherwise set of likeably melodious, key-shifting parts well beyond all reasonable limits.

The context for which the song was intended -- as an accompanying soundtrack to a Parisian fashion show -- explains, if not excuses, the listening experience. Before the song hits the four-minute mark, it's exhausted its ideas; at nine minutes what should be a thirty second bridge is smothered to death in front of you; at twelve minutes, a respectable outro sucks the air out of the room.

For a young, new band's maiden statement, one would hope for a concise declaration of genre, of attitude, of aesthetic prowess, of politics, of style, whatever, less than a coddled, you-had-to-be-there one-off. Still, the promise (and that's the hook that will keep us coming back to the new) insists that we give them another chance. There's potential here.

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