Yr Knives

There’s a lot of Chicago baked into the bones of Yr Knives’ debut. The band is built from improvisers embedded deep in the city’s traditions of smelting jazz, prog, post-rock, and psych into a sound that’s unmistakable, even as it remains impossible to categorize. The members of Yr Knives have found themselves in and among the ranks of Health & Beauty, Tortoise, Eleventh Dream Day, Hanami, and Wild Bell. Here, they act as counterparts and conduits. They’re sparring partners whose each parry pushes the other further. The band came together with an idea of guitars competing for space, independent voices that still seemed to interlock when they’re brought together into proximity. The record succeeds in its ambitions, an album that divines groove through its friction and brings bliss through its fusion.

The assembled players are a no strangers to studio-born tumult, and they dig into a wide array of gnarled guitar influences, with shades of Sharrock, Verlaine, Crazy Horse, and Ayler at the forefront of the record’s influences. They don’t spend all their time biting into the bristle, though. As the record wears into its second half, there’s a languid lacquer that forms over “These Chords,” and closer “White Gladys.” The band is just as adept at pulling off the sonic swirl without the friction that drives the first half of the record. They also let in a few collaborators to color in the crevices of their works, slipping strings on “Fear & Trimbling,” bass clarinet from Jason Stein and sax from Mai Sugimoto. Begin Yr Singing is a testament to the band’s vision and the kind of symbiosis that can happen with the right heads in the studio. It’s a stunning debut, and hopefully just the beginning.

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