THE YOUNG KNIVES "Voices of Animals and Men" Transgressive FOREIGN ISLANDS "Restart Now!" Deaf Dumb + Blind
Friday, March 2, 2007; Page WE07
THE WORST THING about "Voices of Animals and Men" is imagining what the Young Knives' third album will sound like. The English group wantonly devours the work of many forerunners, and this debut album was produced by Gang of Four's Andy Gill, who also supervised the Futureheads' first release. Yet the band the Knives most recall is Supergrass, and not just because both are trios from Oxford. Like early Supergrass, the Knives are bratty yet clever enough to justify it and draw on 1960s pop-rock as well as punk's near-infinite variety. But as its ambitions grew, Supergrass became a bore, which could easily happen to the Knives as well.
In the meantime, "Voices of Animals and Men" is an ingeniously derivative delight. The Knives have been widely compared to British bands from 1977 on, but such tunes as the moderately strange "Tailors," which mixes acoustic guitar with spacey swoops, show that yelping singer-guitarist Henry Dartnall and his colleagues have researched 1967 just as thoroughly. Even such spiky songs as "Weekends and Bleak Days (Hot Summer)," which could never have been written in the '60s, have something of that decade's innocence. The Young Knives may grow old quickly, but this album displays them in the flower of their impish youth.
Periodically, some ambitious and/or jaded musicians decide it would be a novel idea to combine punk and electronics. And it was, back when Roxy Music first did so in 1972. The latest outfit to pursue this not-so-novelty is Foreign Islands, a collaboration between DJ-impresario Mark Ryan and guitarist-producer Dean Baltulonis. The New York combo's "Restart Now!" is a six-song EP (plus two remixes) that layers raw guitar and processed vocals atop nu-disco beats. Such sneering, bleeping tunes as "We Know You Know It" and "Fine Dining With the Future" are brisk back-to-Tomorrowland rock. But it's hard to believe that there's any future in it.
-- Mark Jenkins
Appearing Monday at the Black Cat.
