Young Knives are an English alternative – indie rock band originally from Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire. The band is essentially brothers Henry Dartnall (vocals, guitar), and Thomas Dartnall (vocals, bass guitar), also known as his stage name “The House of Lords”. Their new album `Landfill` is released this month and sees the band contemplating the nature of their existence, and having their vision fixed on how they can best catalogue it through the music. “It’s a record about letting things go before they are taken from you, including the carefully curated images of ourselves. Embracing everything the world throws at you and not taking it to heart,” explained vocalist Henry Dartnall.
The album opens with `A Memory of Venom` with underlying piano keys and cello strings and vocals spread atop with occasional harmonies. It`s a tender fairly melancholic number that has an almost haunting mystical lyrical sentiment. There was a much more funky jazzy vibe about `Ugly House` which is drum led initially and has vocals that are rapidly shared. It slows down at times throughout but feels kind of psychedelic throughout its lifespan.
`Cause & Effect` may be the relationship between two events or situations, where one of the two is the cause of the other. Here it`s a bit of a quirky listen with distorted vocals along with a spoken word stream of consciousness and some rolling beats. Thomas Aquinas developed several arguments for the existence of God, one being the second way which may be hinted at in `The People from The Second Way`. It drifts along with lyrics that may or may not be about God, a celestial being or a deity.
`Dissolution` has lyrics aimed at killing off your ego partly inspired by `Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy`. The words are about the dissolution of the ego or ego death; a thing that appears in eastern religions and was written about in Joseph Campbell’s “A Hero’s Journey.” It`s all set to a ragged jagged quirky soundtrack. A drum machine beat paces us through the electronic `No Sound` which may well be about mortality.
`Your Car Has Arrived` came together after the tragic death of guitarist Henry Dartnall’s son’s best friend and it`s an oddly strange but endearing eulogy of sorts with some delightful horns adding a real expansive depth.
Included in `Gone, Gone, Completely Gone` are the nursery rhyme lyrics “Here is the church, here is the steeple, Open the doors, see all the people” along with others that are more graphic and some that are fairly “out there.” These are shared over an uneven angular stop-start unusual sound that even Syd Barrett would feel was experimental.
The sound of bees eases us into `Love The Knives` which veers from clanging to a more accessible musical tone and may be a dreamlike vision of hurting an adversary who was once possibly a friend. The final minute is a kind of controlled auditory distortion. The album closes with `Fresh Meat` a strangely hypnotic listen which had lyrics that could have come from a Shakespearean tragedy and ends with what may well be the sound of a meat market.
`Landfill` is quite honestly a bit of a challenging listen, the kind of submission that asks more questions than it answers and contemplating the nature of existence is a subject that most of us steer well clear of. The definition of Landfill is a dump and here it`s a dump or scrapheap of thought-provoking ideas and views that may well stimulate some self-examination. A provocative, seductive but stimulating return from a band that are always happy to take risks and push the envelope.
Rating 8.5/10
