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"Clash Magazine" article November 2007
THE YOUNG PUNX
Dance music is known for its inherent lack of humour. In these
days of po-faced minimal techno posers, a hamster burp and a beat
can be hailed as the latest manifestation of genius, with the prankster
antics of The KLF seeming like a distant memory. But all is not lost:
enter stage-left court jesters The Young Punx – also known as
Hal Ritson and Cameron Saunders - whose way with a groove is only
matched by their gleeful sense of the absurd. Their debut album, ‘Your
Music Is Killing Me’, out now on Mofo HiFi, thinks nothing of
fusing firing electro house with rhythmic samples of the shipping
forecast, or recasting Karen Carpenter as a sampled space-age house
minx. The Young Punx are all about upsetting the applecart in any
way possible.
“DJs and underground producers are obsessed with looking cool
and following the next trend - the whole thing is comically self-obsessed.
We don’t play that game,” Ritson explained. “Probably
the biggest difference between us and virtually the entire dance
music industry is our unwillingness to take ourselves seriously.
After all, the whole point of clubbing is meant to be to have fun,”
he added.
‘Your Music Is Killing Me’ sees them jubilantly shredding
genre boundaries, swooping like crack-crazed magpies to grab their
favourite shiny bits with maniacal gusto. One minute it’s
all campy lounge-core strings and tearing drum ‘n’ bass
beats (‘Drum And Bacharach’), the next we’re in
the kind of cut-up electro-funk territory that acts like MSTRKRFT
can only dream of (‘Fire’). Cutting between breaks,
’80s pop, and rock guitar histrionics like a channel-surfing
child with attention deficit disorder, The Young Punx are vehemently
anti-categorisation.
“We scavenge whatever musical styles we come across, along
with elements of adverts, TV programmes, films, magazines, graffiti:
anything that comes our way. It’s all fair game,” grinned
Ritson. “We are just making whatever music we like, and not
feeling constrained about what that should be.” The fact that
they work in the studio that was formerly Pete Waterman’s
Hit Factory, with some junglist neighbours in the studio opposite,
gives some idea of The Young Punx’ curiously potent combination
of styles. Mixing pop accessibility with raw dancefloor nous, theirs
is an addictive and refreshing tonic.
Featuring an array of guest talents, including soul chanteuse Yolanda,
who’s worked with Bugz in the Attic and Deekline, and guitarist
Guthrie Govan, the album has a musicality rare in a time that dance
music is supposedly stripping itself bare. And with lyrical concerns
mocking the plastic surgery craze, (‘Young And Beautiful’),
and the maddening effects of musical obsession (the title track),
The Young Punx certainly aren’t playing by the rules. The
last piece of the subversive jigsaw is to rip up the knob-twiddling
stereotype of the live dance act.
“We’ve come up with a show that combines dance sounds
with the energy rush of a real rock gig, and a bit of cabaret freakshow
for entertainment!” On this evidence, Punx very much alive
and kicking.
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