Imprisonment is the key to a good sitcom - be it in an hotel (Fawlty Towers), an office (The Office) or a prison (Porridge). The sit has to be a predicament that its characters yearn to escape, while the com comes from the fact that they're unlikely to do so. Once in a while, it's a formula that also extends to a great debut album.

Before the release of Voices of Animals and Men in 2005, the Young Knives' frontman Henry Dartnall worked for a company that supplied interactive whiteboards to local education authorities. But listening to songs such as Loughborough Suicide and She's Attracted To - with the opening line “Who are these people?/ They are too stupid to be your real friends” - it was pretty obvious that a Fall-loving philosophy graduate may not be best suited to long hours on the phone talking his client base through the instructional strategy solutions enabled by his product.

Theoretically, things should be looking up - but anyone expecting Dartnall to display a newly acquired lust for life in the wake of a Mercury nomination might care to note that the catchiest chorus on Superabundance is a splenetic diary of disappointment entitled Counters, which goes: “Sitting in the front seat/ Turning on the motor/ Sucking on the hosepipe/ Keep it turning over.” Elsewhere - the hellbound harmonic handcart of Turn Tail; the dystopian marching music of Terra Firma - there's an encroaching sense that, whatever environment Dartnall might be in, he would sound much as Philip Larkin might had he been forced to spend a Saturday afternoon in Claire's Accessories.

“Everybody looks famous,” sings Dartnall on the Heat-culture cri de coeur Up All Night. Just three words here are enough to conjure the necessary mental images of meticulously coiffed twentysomethings who take their sartorial cues from McFly and Girls Aloud and work to spend their down-time slurping frapuccinos in satellite-town retail villages.

The Current of the River sees the trio bringing a skeleton-shaking ferocity to a lyrical collage of 3am night terrors. Disturbing? Normally, perhaps, but by then, you've already been party to the images of fleeing fearful children detailed on the valve-shattering rumble of I Can Hardly See Them.

Superabundance, then, isn't the sound of a band kicking back and basking in new freedoms. Modern life has never sounded more thrillingly rubbish.

(Transgressive)

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