Young Knives

Young Knives have come a long way since their emergence in 2002. And not just from the medieval market town and civil parish environs of Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

2006’s Mercury-nominated debut long-player ‘Voices of animals and men’ produced by Gang of Four’s Andy Gill was a shining light amidst a cavalcade of retro-activated ‘post-punk’ pantomime gloom. Where most of the then ‘new wave’ played at it, wrestling with a contextless cultural landscape derided by the media as ‘landfill indie’ Young Knives lived it. Breathed it. Got on with it. On their terms.

Sixth album proper, waggishly titled ‘Landfill’, is further demonstration of the Knives’ unwillingness to be defined by external limitations or confined by past expectations. In a year when the lords of Brit-Trad return with their scripted soap-opera squabbling and (n)ever-so-tired retread-rock, it’s in groups like Young Knives that the sounds of the future still lie. In front, not behind.

Drip-feeding the ten tracks prior to release to their devotees, every day was accompanied by a uniquely Young Knivesian summary of the album’s context and creation and playlists of influences. Produced by the pair the album is mixed by Tunng’s Mike Lindsay, another group attuned to acid folklore and placid candour.

However, Young Knives haven’t really travelled that far at all, they have stayed rooted to what made them so unique in the first place.. Serrated surrealism, the lacerating intricacies of human affairs and relations and searing, sharp and sardonic observations have remained steadfastly at the core of the brothers Dartnall’s (Henry and Thomas aka House of Lords) entire output.

Add in the relentless pursuit of sonic experimentation: pop-prog (the PiL-lustrative ‘Dissolution’); skronk-rock (‘Ugly House’); noise-folk (the unsettling cult-mantra ‘The people of the Second Way’ and the electro-pulsing ‘No Sound’) and orch-ward poetics (‘A memory of venom’ and he mourning call of ‘Your car has arrived’) and other assorted re-combinations of sound and texture it’s another album to push boundaries and challenge categories, envisioning limitless space to go forth and amplify. The penultimate track ‘Love the Knives’ is a timely humanthem, augmented by the Young Knives Choir it moves from birdsong and discordant drone to elegiac chorus and climaxing with mechanical symphonics. Nature and nurture in a nutshell.

Young Knives are a typically English affair. Like forebears Robert Wyatt, Peter Hamill, Peter Gabriel, Syd Barrett, Kevin Ayers and Virginia Astley there’s always been a perfectly particularly peculiar element in their work that is resolutely Merrie England. Symbolic without being nostalgic, pastorally progressive, whimsically current, a splintered twinkle in the mind’s eye. Believing in the utopian dream where things can be better because they should be better.

If time is an illusion and existence is constrained within a psychic cage then heightened awareness is the only way out. Young Knives can assist in a safe passage, simply allow them.