Get out the knives

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Well, another part of the mythology is a list of influences including the The Stooges, though I struggled to hear their influence other than that the singer goes 'YEAH' a lot. According to their site it's more of a spontaneity thing, though their songs and career seem pretty well-mapped-out to me. Out of all the influences cited (the Ramones are also mentioned) Black Sabbath makes the most sense. Shallow Grave and a layered guitar melody interlude on California conjure the gunga mist. The Queens of the Stone Age influence is apparent but confused, appropriate for the stone zone. California is probably the most obviously attribute of the Queens. Maybe the first track Skin Flicks and its follower Kids, with its dark dense fuzz of guitars and bleak yet poppy riffs, is less retrograde in its hat-tipping. Bellowing multi-track vocals in the chorus 'with kids these days/with kids these days/with kids these days' leave no room for subtlety. These guys are all proficient players. They like to hit you over the head. They don't want you to switch off or ignore them, with plenty of parts exposing their potency in the majority of the songs.

Their song California is on the new ADIO skate video, and it makes sense. I can imagine their songs being great listening for bong-smoking, while watching extreme sport. Try it out: the music surges as the surf sprays, the snow cascades, the parachute opens, the ollie ollies beyond the rational laws of ollieing, the bungy elastic twangs when the guitar wah tapping solo goes totally sick. Give it a go. It's magic, I promise. And if it fails, at least you'll be stoned.

The Knives are a hard working band, just having come out of the ROCK ADIO tour around America's prime real estate. Hang on, did I mention that they are sponsored by ADIO? Maybe while skating in your ADIO shoes you can listen to The Knives downloaded into your iPod for inspiration as you scheme up the next crazy vert thrill and perfect that kick flip. Of course skating is a real American Dream machine with plenty of trailer-trash to pro-gear stories. Plenty of product. So what's the story with our 'downtown' LA boys made good with the handshake of corporate rock? They are a likely bunch of bandida'd, aviator-bespectacled screaming lads. Check out their website www.theknives.net. The only thing you'll find at the moment under Merch is their CD though - but don't fret, I'm sure it'll be 'ripping at the seams' soon enough.

With songs like Shallow Grave, they are joining a legion of coke snorting, limousine riding, groupie groping, power rock, equally bandida'd bands like Motley Crue, living the California bachelor boy high life - you can practically hear their mighty belt buckles bouncing the beams of light right back atcha. It's great these days, with rock being in vogue - you can dress badassed with all the simulated grime in the world. You don't actually smell bad, but you still present a reasonably good approximation of looking tough and like you've 'been around the block' (Around the Block).

This is a relentlessly thrusting album with all the rock poses, props, licks, party shenanigans, death and doom:

...children flock, ready to rock
at the old Burgundy Room/
where the fires of hell meet the potent spell/
of whiskey and perfume
( Around the Block)

This is actually one of the more disappointing and trite songs with upward arcing 'Ye-ah's' and been 'row-ow-nd' with a boring vocal melody from Le'Von Webb. At best, it is mercifully brief.

But for the rest of Skin Flicks you will be saturated with squawls of guitar from Brane, incite-ful and cynical lyrics from Le'Von that seek sanctuary in that which it lambasts - bad living baby!

Slits, tits, mirrored ceilings
fame, shame, affected squealing
filth M.I.L.F., a mother kneeling
cock, rock, obscene revealing
broken sweat, guilty feelings
skin flicks and dirty dealing
skin flicks and dirty dealings
skin flicks make me feel good
(Skin Flicks)

There's some ugh's too. Chugging dirty bass from curly-locked Scott, and tight and edgy drums from Jonny U. Yup, they're a boy band with their own identities - names - and each has a haircut distinctive from the other so as not to confuse.

But what's the story? Where did they come from? Is Le'Von really the 'subdued lovechild of Mike Patton and Deron Miller,' as reviewer Jackson Stewart puts it? The Knives like to keep it vague as though they're street creatures who've risen up the ramp from the pit of sleaze, been around the block to tell their stories in LA, 'heaven of the parasitic,' to the throng of eager kids. It all seems pretty rosy for these boys pictured inner-sleeve with darkly-shadowed eye sockets. The drummer's sorted for cymbals with sponsorship from Istanbul AGOP, Alchemy, and Vic Firth is handing out the free sticks. They seem well-positioned for a rise to fame as cleverly constructed as their songs, (the next installment of the story is on its way, but right now it's all about the music, man) but, despite this talent for calculation, are they ultimately doomed to be as Le'Von sings in Ripping At the Seams: 'another Hollywood statistic?'. Based on those very statistics, the answer is: probably.

Learn more about The Knives.

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Cut and dried

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Those Who Were Hung Hang Here opens with a whirring intro track, simply called Intro before a hammering drum beat, which is Understanding the New Violence, slowly layering robotically rigid, tightly wound instruments and takes a while to get to the point - maybe this is the techno influence - building the layers before blasting you with the bliss wall of sound that will make some say "yeh". The new violence is an ambitious concept, but seems pretty passive-aggressive, and though the band members like to hit their instruments on every beat of 4/4 it falls short of hitting hard, it doesn't really rise up much beyond a flatline - melodically or structurally, just keeps stretching on like a highway. But maybe this is Uncut's drab aesthetic. Their bio certainly seems to nod towards an approval of, and I quote, "dour indie types".

The second song, Buried With Friends is reminiscent of Interpol's bland tonality (well much of the album is - I'm not the first to bring up the Interpol similarities) - and pumps along insistently with goth-pop steam transparently similar to Placebo. It's an instantly familiar guitar line that will hook people in - until the troubled vocals seep through, but you'd expect some paranoia from a title like Buried With Friends.

Copilot starts at a more intimate level. Then the spindly guitar cranks up into uninterrupted fuzz chord passages, then reflective jangle, more husky vocal slinking and BAM! the guitars again. There are some nice guitar lines in here reflective of the Joy Division influence mentioned in their bio.

Uncut formed out of the ashes of Ian Worang and Jake Fairley, "a techno producer of some esteem" roomates who finally got talking at party and decided to create a guitarsy techno duo. They built up a profile, playing gigs and attracted a recording offer, but somewhere in the summer of 2001-2002 it went pear-shaped. On a visit to Germany, Jake had built respect in the Cologne techno-set. He decided, mere days before his scheduled return to Worang's side, to remain in Germany and build his solo career there instead. Worang pulled together from the ranks of people he knew a more traditional, all-boy band of guitar, drums, bass and vocals, but still with the flavour of techno coursing through the songs.
And finally in 2004, the album was made. There is much chatter hyping the "boundary smashing rock-meets-techno" sound, but this hybridisation of genres and blurring of influences has become very familiar with the not-so recent disco-punk, folk-hip hop kind of explosions, and in fact has gone on cheerfully throughout music history both ancient and modern. This landscape of dark paranoid vocals slinking through dramatic chugging chord landscapes, and marching snare heavy beats backed by drum loops and trebly metallic basslines and general fuzz, has been well charted by people like Nine Inch Nails. In fact, most of the time the vocals from Ian Worang skulk like Trent Reznor and Brian Molko, Placebo's front man (though thankfully less whiney) having a quiet serious word. Worang, who is said to snarl and brood onstage a little louder and more angrily than the recording, creeps up the register a little for In This Morning Grey a brief and pretty melancholy melody moving to an appealing guitar line reminiscent of The Pixies.

St Petersburg also rises above the general somberness of the vocals with some sad-sounding upper register ah's and a more complex arrangement than the rest of the album. But generally, it's all pretty straight ahead and there's nothing much that sounds really new. It's possibly more the pretty melancholy jangle of songs like St Petersburg - conjuring Ok Computer - that transcends the techno-rock pigeon hole and reaches their "dour indie" audience.

Taken In Sleep, the least inspiring song of the album, boasts a middle 8 with an electronic sound like a theremin in a fish tank but is ultimately betrayed by unimaginative overplayed chords. Some may choose to bliss out in techno tradition, enjoying the fuzz as the song goes on and on…and on.

Day Breaks, Red Light and A Summer Day are power pop songs that pep up the generally disconsolate tone of Those Who Were Hung Hang Here. A Summer Day salutes Blue Monday - after the cue from the bio mentioning their Joy Division and New Order influence, I'd been waiting for more signs of it - and ends up sounding more influenced by the Strokes, rollicking through to the closing track, which is pure trudging power pop fuzz, the vocals a nicotine-stained croak by this stage.

It will be a pleasing album for some who are looking for a petulant, stomping soundtrack to fuzz out the day to: a skulking voice to confer with, a guitar-line to hum to while making the umpteenth instant coffee for the day, constantly cymbal-laden drums to nod along to. But I don't feel that Uncut have yet reached the hype-worthy status that they or their record label may be attempting to foist on them. All in all it's solid, but not "boundary smashing". Maybe just plain solid is the new violence.

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