Known as The House Of Lords, bass-playing Thomas Dartnall is one third of England’s most charasmatic indie-rock band, Young Knives. Along with his vocalist brother Henry Dartnall and drummer Oliver Askew, the group have just released a sterling second record called Superabundance. Nick Milligan spoke to the House himself about how his band got in touch with their darker side.
Being a bold and adventurous trio of lads, Young Knives are about to head into a studio to record directly on to vinyl. It’s a dated technique, but they’re going to try it anyway. This is not the first courageous step that the band have taken in their comparatively short career.
Hailing from the country in Leicestershire’s Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Young Knives have always embraced their rural origins, where other bands often align themselves with a ‘big city’ ethos.
Although the group’s wry sense of black humour was spread sporadically throughout their debut album, Voices Of Animals and Men (when the group couldn’t come up with a middle section for one of the album’s tracks, they simply used an audio bite of them discussing what to put in the middle of the track), the music itself was vigourous and upbeat.
“Our last album had a couple of darker songs, but they had been written much later on,” explains The House Of Lords. “We wanted to take this new album further in that direction. Something a bit darker, lyrically, and with slightly folkier melodies.”
House admits that the group’s humour is intrinsically sewn into their material. “We try not to be ridiculous, but we also try not to be deadly serious… or melodramatic. We like to have a bit of a light and dark,” confirms House. “Some of the lyrics are obviously dark. But there’s a song on there called ‘I Can Hardly See Them’, which lyrically is not that dark – it’s more about half-remembered memories of childhood, and what was actually real compared to how your memory has changed over time. We use distortion on the drums and grinding metal sounds, which we’ve never done to that extent before in terms of ‘loudness’.”
Young Knives’ charasmatic 2006 debut, Voices Of Animals and Men, had an angular, post-punk sound, but it was infused with the warmth of Brit-pop. The group wanted there to be a lot of space in the recording, so they enlisted Gang Of Four member Andy Gill as a producer. To diverge from the sparseness of this album, the trio approached producer Tony Doogan to collaborate with on their sophomore release.
“We try not to be ridiculous, but we also try not to be deadly serious… or melodramatic.”
“We really like our first album, but it’s got a very obvious, indie-guitar sound. It’s just guitar, bass, drums and a vocalist. It really does sound like it was produced by a member of Gang Of Four. We could have recorded our new songs in the same way, but we didn’t want to repeat ourselves. Tony [Doogan] had worked with bands like Belle and Sebastian and Super Furry Animals, who we are quite big fans of,” explains House.
Superabundance’s most puzzling track is ‘Flies’. At just over 90 seconds in length, the song is about… well, you guessed it. “I was reading something in a book… I can’t remember what it was. But it had a sentence which described a number of dead bodies with flies all over them, and it was like they ‘were sleeping under a blanket’. I thought it was [a nice image], in a way. So I wrote a song which expanded on that,” says House. “There was something about the idea of being stuck in a swarm of flies and it being quite pleasant.”
Unlike most bands where the lead singer is the sole curator of lyric writing (and often songwriting), Young Knives work together equally. “Somebody might write a riff or a vocal part, but then we just go to the studio and jam it out. We might write a whole verse and chorus, but once we’ve worked on them in the studio, we might get rid of them and put in something else instead,” explains House. “Playing together in a room is very organic for us.”
Young Knives’ self-deprecating dryness comes into play on ‘Up All Night’, which opens with someone getting ready to hit the town, only to be completely dumb-struck by how uncool they look compared to other clubbing folk (“I got dressed up/up to the nines/I took a look in the mirror/I wish I was thinner”). “’Up All Night’ is also about how you go to the pub and stay out all night. You hope that the night will get more fun, so you keep drinking, waiting for it. But it only gets more tedious and you just want to go to bed,” says House.
The album’s title alludes to Young Knives’ view of the wealthy citizens in England. “We live in a fairly rich country – everyone’s pretty well-off and comfortable. Superabundance mirrored that. Then we discarded the name for ages and ages, trying to think of something else. But after six months we decided that it sounded quite good. It’s a nice, long word and looks good on paper,” chuckles House.
The cover of Superabundance depicts a motorcyclist burning rubber, seemingly with no desire to go anywhere. This is the exact vision that Young Knives had. “We were trying to think of images for the front that would be dramatic and we wanted to do something under harsh theatrical lights – like taking an action out of its context. A dramatic action. Burning the tires out is about the most stupid thing you can do!” laughs House.
Superabundance is out now through Warner.
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