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This post ought to have featured last week, when Manchester’s In The City New Music Conference was relevant, current and new. I wanted to see Lost Knives quite badly, but was ‘held up watching another band’.

A quick glance at the schedule would reveal that I was at the Dutch Uncles gig, but a delve into the truth would expose that I had holed up in a kebab shop and was shoving dubious spicy meat into my idiot face.

I wished I’d seen them, especially when, the next day, talk of their performance was a drizzle of positive chatter. My guilt was compounded when one the band then sent me an email asking if I’d seen them play.

So this review is part praise, part apology, and part admission of dumb servitude to a base need for cheap meat. Lost Knives are a good band, who will succeed regardless of any shabby chuntering on a new music blog.

If they do make it, it will have been their songs that drove them there. Tracks like Cold Morning are rumbustious enough to please the indie purists and to shake the rest from their slumber. A foot stomper in the very truest sense, Lost Knives throw big chord changes, clobbering drums and gritted-teeth vocals in, and get skyscraping rock in return.

Laden with end-of-world doom and shoot-to-the-moon ambition, it’s a song as wide-eyed as it is jittering with aggro. Lost Knives are less spicy, but more meaty than any amount of grilled, skewered meat. Praise indeed.