The pictures on their website could honestly have been taken in the late ‘70s or at least the early ‘80s, which is an interesting entry point to YOUNG BRITISH ARTISTS.

They look like they could fit into the era where bands played with their backs to the audience; when anonymity was an attitude (and not a disguise for acne or a lack of anything to say).

YBA are from Manchester, used to trade under a different name, and (a little disappointingly?) are “mostly influenced by American bands,” which would certainly explain the check shirts, but not the urgency inherent in their sound.

Recent single ‘Lived In Skin’ is one of my favourite records of the year so far. It’s an excitingly percussive-driven pop song, with an insistent spindly guitar line and a dry and partially buried British vocal. It races along, detailed and (nearly) danceable; an exhausting five minutes of scorched post-punk melody.

‘Million Miles’ on the flip, has a janglier, less angular side to it (a trace of the Americanisms?) with a slightly more mournful narrative and a less in your face feel. Meanwhile some of the reviews even describe them as “shoegazey but looking up at the stars.”

I like this sort of confusion. I like the way the blurb which came with the CD was Xeroxed and typewritten and ever so slightly enigmatic.

You sense serious young men at work; earnestly still trying to find out where they fit in (or better still don’t fit in). It’s very good.

We await gigs down south with growing excitement.

Young British Artists live here on myspace

Picture: YBA by Sanna Berger