Welcome to Day 1 of the Full Landfill Experience introduction to the new album. The first song you are getting is “A Memory of Venom”. Feel free to consume this in any order you like but our suggestion would be to download the song fist, have a listen, then watch the video, then look at the pictures and listen to the playlist of songs that loosely inspired us to write this song.
We had two amazing friends help us with this track – Max Blansjaar on piano and the very talented Alice Ream on Cello (which really makes the track in my opinion).
Hope you enjoy it.
Cheers
Henry & House xx
Some waffle about the song – some of which is very interesting.
Here is a Spotify playlist of some of the songs that informed A Memory of Venom. We know that not everyone has Spotify so here is a list of the songs and there are some youtube videos of tracks below too.
A Memory of venom
That’s in and underwater
More nitrogen for the soil
Sugar becomes alcohol
Commonly accepted
By mothers and by teachers
You eat the man you worship
So sanguine no sense of humour
Jetpack Buddha
Selfish Buddha
Jetpack Buddha
Selfish Buddha
Missing but not forgotten
Gone but all around
Missing but not forgotten
Gone but all around
The science of reason
The unconscious mind
Comes to nothing
The sun dies
The triumph of human
The last sacrifice
All for nothing
The mind meets the sky
The piano on this track was a messy piece of Midi made of 3 piano tracks badly played and glued together.
A special thank you must go to our good friend Max Blansjaar for arranging and playing the piano.
Max was at the time a music student at oxford Uni so he had access to the practice rooms for the music dept. So we took full advantage and used the Steinway they have to record the piano track that you hear on the song.
Max is also a musical artist in his own right and will be supporting us on the upcoming UK tour.
Here are some links to his music:
A Track by track of Max’s Album: False Comforts
Max playing Memory of Venom
A collection of different bits of the recording with Max and the talented Alice Ream on Cello and some singing from us.
Thanks for being here and being interested in what we do.
I thought it might be nice to add a little bit of general
overview stuff about the album on these pages too as it is kind of a collection of songs that have a common-ish threat tying them together.
Every time we do an album it feels different. What I mean is
that although it’s still under the name Young Knives, we are just by the laws of nature, very different people and that’s why we keep writing records, if it ended up feeling the same then I think we would stop.
However there are some throw backs on this album to our old
“sound”. It has been nice to relax into that a bit this time. When we were working on our last album “Barbarians” it was definitely an exercise in pushing the boundaries of our sound. That was great fun but this time we didn’t feel the need to reproduce that. It still has informed a lot of what we have done on this album but we have not forced the sound as much this time. We were more interested in mixing styles and concentrating more on keeping songs simple and
keeping space in them. That was the initial idea anyway, things still got full and bombastic in places but there is more of a focus on song writing (whatever that means).
Also you may notice some fairly “philosophical” lyrics on these songs. I (Henry) have often struggled with lyrics. I found the hardest time was when we were enjoying some mainstream success. I think at the time we were just being in a band and getting drunk or whatever, so we had very little to write about outside being in a band. But luckily everything changes all of the time constantly. As life has thrown its inevitable challenges and the illusion of
time passing has become more apparent I have found words come thick and fast. I don’t yet know if anyone will like them, but it is the artist’s prerogative to not care what people think.Mmmh. However I do really care so you had better like them.
Having said all that, we wrote the lyrics on this song together which is always nice. Also as a follow up to the video there is definitely a piece of music that is like a Russian march or something that inspired the melody of the “The Science of Reason” etc. bit – However I can’t work out what it is so someone will have to please let us know what we have stolen here and then we can add it to the playlist.
Feel free to email your answer to us – notaband@young-knives.com
Have a nice day and see you tomorrow.x
