Gadzook (label)
25 March 2020 (released)
25 March 2020
To pronounce the ‘can’t-come-soon-enough’ new album, ‘Barbarians’, out in September, Young Knives declare:
“Young Knives is not a band
Young Knives is not music
Young Knives is not art”
This manifesto raises the questions, ‘who’ and ‘what’ are they then?
‘Barbarians’ will be the Dartnell siblings’ fifth album and first since 2013’s ‘Sick Octave’. ‘Sheep Tick’ follows on from last year’s ‘shock-dropped’ release, the equally psychically disconcerting and ear-battering ‘Red Cherries’.
In keeping with their output to date this song and forthcoming album is informed by humanity’s ever-increasing inability to develop and progress beyond the confines of the individual with(in) the collective entity: essentially, how society’s moulding and shaping only serves to inhibit true and pure intentions and instead actively encourage cruelty and brutality. The atavistic animalistic remains dominant. So far, so Young Knives.
‘Sheep Tick’ is accompanied by an ‘anti-video’ visuals, another cryptic horrorshow populated by nightmarish figures and folk-pagan imagery as if Ben Wheatley had created it (one character reminds of the disturbing ‘Noseybonk’ from 1980s television programme ‘Jigsaw’). A surreal descent into the depths of ‘reality’. To misquote Buzzcock Pete Shelley ‘Life’s the delusion, love is the scheme’.
The song itself is another (dis)array of crash-bang-wallop noise fragments, synth-etic shards and elliptical lyricism, both texturally experimental and textually experiential. What you ‘see’ is what you ‘get’.
As the opening lines forewarn of (y)our fellow humans: "Cruelty, I let you back in / I'm wondering why" the control of desire is a daily battle between right and wrong. Choose your options carefully.
Young Knives are heading back. Be ready.
