Young Knives – Sick Octave
Market town pop chroniclers of suburban emptiness go DIY.
Recorded in Los Angeles with Nick Launay, Young Knives’ last album, 2011’s Ornaments From The Silver Arcade was the big clean indie-pop sound of a band being middle managed into conformity. Self-produced and self-recorded, funded on Kickstarter, Sick Octave is the group’s subsequent grab for artistic freedom.
Cut on homemade equipment in a disused air-hanger, Sick Octave initially feels like the answer record to 2008’s Superabundance, multi-track major label riches now repossessed, replaced by a buzzing car boot Britpop that draws as much from the spare-time nothingness of Alternative TV and Swell Maps as Damon Albarn’s Blur. Songs shift from half-built narratives of modern Britain to jagged crack-ups in Golden Dawn Greece (Owls Of Athens), and ex-pat Dubai (White Sands), resulting in a startlingly strange and diverse album whose mix of pummeling pop attack and quiet interior sadness perfectly soundtracks the new horrors and old beauties of our terrible present.
Listen to the album in full...