While the big centers for art and music remain in notable locales like New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo and Berlin, the most impressive, innovative and important music has often come out of smaller, less well-known places. The most famous band in history hailed from Liverpool, a disproportionate number of huge bands came out of the quirky college town of Athens, Georgia in the 1980's and recently there has been a significant boom in top-notch music coming out of Austin, Texas. Back in England, the country's propensity for non-London centers of modern sound has continued to blossom. Like the small but powerful influence of the town of Bristol in the late 90's with bands like Portishead, today there is an electronic renaissance going on in Southend-on-Sea, a former resort in Essex. Along with Crystal Castles, British Sea Power and Klaxons, one of the most exciting bands to come out Southend in the past few years is These New Puritans.

Forming in 2006, These New Puritans consists of chief songwriter and vocalist Jack Barnett, his brother George on percussion, bassist and percussionist Thomas Hein and keyboardist Sophie Sleigh-Johnson. The band is solidly art rock, but that particular designation tends to change with each passing year. Go back thirty years and it meant theatrical shockers like Bauhaus, evolving into a lot of avant garde noise in the 90's. In 2008 when These New Puritans released their debut album Beat Pyramid, it basically equated to being conversant in a lot of different styles.

Beat Pyramid is an intense album that is equal parts The Fall and alternative hip hop. Barnett's lyrics pulverize the foreground with repetition, his thick accent as much an effect as the reverberation added in post-production. The album is at once highly literate and completely wild. Lyrics about pre-Socratic philosophers coexist with tribal percussion and needling synthesizer pans. Most of Beat Pyramid is a mix of frenetic rap and post-punk rock, though in the case of the former it sounds more like the grimy UK style hip hop of the 21st century than any American gangsta or modern club varieties.

The heavier side of Beat Pyramid has a lot of similarities to Jamaican dancehall music, though all the artful mixing and East Atlantic stoicism keeps it from sounding all that equatorial. If there was any doubt that These New Puritans had a soft core under their spiky exterior, January 2010's Hidden clears it right up. As Jack Barnett mentioned in a post-Beat Pyramid interview, there's an unusual amount of bassoon and other organic instruments on Hidden. The opening track of the album, "5", consists mostly of a classical symphonic wind section. Only about half of the album continues in the fiery tradition of Beat Pyramid, and even then it's a more experimental, deliberate version of it.

Hidden is all-around more melodic than its predecessor. Even though it's only the band's second album, it feels like a transition piece. Should These New Puritans record a third, it will no doubt be very different than either Beat Pyramid or Hidden, and it will likely be much more focused. With the right promotion and a liberal dollop of cultural justice, it'll be a hard-won success for this criminally underrated band.