Credit: Found On Internet

The curse of the Mercury! The curse of the Mercury! Oh how the music media-types love that conspiracy. The highest profile urban myth of music industry awards (okay, so it’s not as if the list is that big) but the whispers that surround the most talked-about album prize and the poisoned chalice it is to the winners, is regurgitated year after year.

But it’s not just the winners who get cursed. Bar the noble losers – you know, when Blur, The Streets, Radiohead losing out to M People, Miss Dynamite and Roni Size, and the plain ridiculous (the very concept that ‘Permission To Land’ by The Darkness was once considered a potential winner now seems ludicrous) – its not as if being a runner-up has ever guaranteed a long and successful career?

So here’s the first release by The Young Knives since ‘Voices of Animals and Men’ became one of the also-rans of the 2007 prize. But unlike ‘She’s Attracted To’ and ‘Here Comes The Rumour Mill’, the angular spikiness of the guitars just doesn’t have the bug-eyed intensity of the prior releases. Their geeky iconoclasticism has been submerged beneath a pedestrian indie post-punk work out.

The Ashby-de-la-Zouch trio are supposedly holed up in Scotland working on the follow-up to ‘Voices…’ – here’s hoping they’ll have rebuilt that head of steam that made their prior musical barbs so invigorating in the first place.

‘Terra Firma’ is out now on Transgressive Records.