ALBUM REVIEW: Knife Club – Knife Club Classics (TNSrecords)
Knife Club are a DIY punk band who formed in late 2019, and released their debut album just as the world was going into a covid-enforced lockdown.
Undeterred, they pressed ahead with the release of We Are Knife Club (reviewed here), and instantly announced themselves as a band worth listening to.
A ‘supergroup’ consisting of members of various bands from Manchester-based indie punk label TNSRecords, they are a band who don’t stand still for long.
Two years on from that impressive debut, they’ve released an acoustic EP and a standalone single, and now they’ve taken an electronic turn.
Knife Club are Zoë Barrow (Casual Nausea) and Andy Davies (Revenge Of The Psychotronic Man/TNSrecords) on vocals, Eliott Verity (Nosebleed) and Dan Flanagan (Haest/Matilda’s Scoundrels) on guitar, Dani Rascal (Faintest Idea) on bass and Chris ‘Big Hands’ Hinsley (Revenge of…) on drums.
Here, with the help of some more friends from the DIY scene, they’ve remixed and reimagined songs from those first two releases, and added an all-new electronically-written tune.
Some tracks work better than others; Syd.31’s remix of TNSClub7, which provided the germ of an idea for Club Classics, is a Prodigy-like rave banger, while James Domestic’s Itchy Brain Dub 2.0 offers a very different take on Artex, one of the standout tracks on the original album.
Elsewhere, there’s an eclectic mix of electro punk, ’90s dance, rave, drum and bass, experimental electro, dub and synth pop, and nods to acts like Faithless and Aphex Twin. Punk? Not really, but isn’t ignoring the very conventions that are supposed to make something ‘punk’ the epitome of being ‘punk’? 6/10.
- Club Classics, whose artwork is inspired by the Gatecrasher nightclub sleeves, is available on limited edition neon pink vinyl (300 only), CD, tape and download (with two bonus tracks on digital/CD). You can get it direct from TNSRecords HERE.
