In the seven years since Silent Shout, 's mythology has grown to the point where the Swedish duo seem like something other than a band. 'Band” implies people banging on things widely agreed upon as instruments and making things that most people would recognize as 'music'- this feels like an inadequately pedestrian way to describe what Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer are. Perhaps even more so in their absence, the Knife have come to seem like a vibe, an ethic, a dark, not-entirely-scientifically-understood phenomena; other bands are to the Knife what matter is to anti-matter. When new artists say they’ve been influenced by the Knife- and it’s a claim countless have made in the past few years- they are at this point referencing not just a specific sound but an entire way of being in our information-glutted world: a desire to retain a tightly controlled, precisely evocative sense of mystery and mastery over their image. Even in the wake of such pollutants as international success, ubiquitous acclaim, and frequent imitation, the Knife have found a way to keep their name meaning something remarkably unique and pure.
ARTIST: The Knife ALBUM: Shaking The Habitual FORMAT: MPEG Audio (MP3) GENRE: Electronic Release Date: 2013-04-02 Source: CD.
This has something to do with the fact that Andersson and Dreijer have gone to great lengths to come off like they are something other than human. On stage, they were silhouettes glowing behind a translucent screen. They gave interviews and accepted awards in disguise (moving through a terrifying cycle of, and of course who could forget Andersson's infamous?).
And on the steely, electro-nightmare Silent Shout- their first great record- they found new ways to viscerally integrate these ideas into their sound, warping and pitch-shifting Andersson’s vocals until they grew androgynous and post-human. Somewhere in the past seven years, the Knife reached that Lynchian status where everything they do is their own, adjectivally specific kind of creepy. The early press photos for their new album, made an activity as innocent as feel forebodingly sinister.
But buying 'post-human' mythology wholesale has always sold the Knife a little short. After all, what was their breakthrough hit 'Heartbeats' if not a heavy-breathing declaration of vulnerability? Even Silent Shout cut through the abstraction and found a pulse- whether it was the strobe-lit dancefloor rhythms of “We Share Our Mothers’ Health” and “Neverland” or the palpitating storytelling of a song like “Forest Families”. The driving force of their music is the interplay between the uncanny and the familiar, though in all the theatricality it's easy to forget the latter. But the early information that trickled out about Shaking the Habitual served as a reminder. We’re so used to experiencing the Knife at a cool, veiled distance that the most shocking things about their return were the ones that seemed uncharacteristically personable: their faces (on full display in the anarchic video for ), their, their smiles (were they actually in that photo?).
For all their sinister, shadowy abstraction, the Knife are at their most disarming and affecting when you’re briefly reminded- and you often are, over the course of their sprawling, magnificent fourth album Shaking the Habitual- that Andersson and Dreijer are human after all. Boundary-busting in content and in form, the 2xCD Shaking the Habitual challenges plenty of perceived notions- about extreme wealth, the patriarchy, the monarchy, environmental degradation, decreasing attention spans (“It's nice to play with people's time these days,” Andersson says in explanation of the record's marathon length), and not the least of which the Knife's own identity as a band. The winding, unbridled song structures and industrial-tinged, organic sounds are such a departure from the rest of their output that they’ve said they initially considered releasing it under a different name. Shaking certainly pulls from a wider aesthetic palette than any of their previous records: found sound drones (they crafted the 19-minute “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized” from editing hours of electronic feedback they'd recorded in a boiler room), zithers, an instrument they apparently made out of “an old bedspring” and “a microphone”- all employed in the name of breaking their own habits. “We went temporarily acoustic,” they declared in the that served as Shaking's press bio. “Electronic is just one place in the body.” In plenty of ways, Shaking seems to have “inaccessible” etched into every fiber of its DNA.
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It is 98 minutes long (about double the length of the already-epic-seeming Silent Shout). Six of its thirteen songs exceed eight minutes. The released with its music videos (“'A Tooth For An Eye' deconstructs images of maleness, power and leadership. Who are the people we trust as our leaders and why? What do we have to learn from those we consider inferior?”) read like museum placards.
There are two long, dissonant drone pieces- and one of them has the feel-good title “Fracking Fluid Injection”. But once you surrender to these facts and descend into Shaking the Habitual, its atmosphere is strangely, surprisingly inhabitable.
Moving fluidly between potent bursts of electro-aggression (“A Tooth for an Eye”), seductively uncoiling, meditative grooves (“Raging Lung”) and ambient stretches, Shaking the Habitual- like Swans’ recent and similarly mammoth The Seer- doesn’t demand the same kind of attention the whole time. Many of the things that might seem off-putting in theory are what make it hang together so well as a front-to-back listen- the drone pieces are sequenced such that they act as intermissions, though the kind where the air conditioner's at an uncomfortable full blast and the house lights remain, evocatively, dark. Put it on in a room and it snakes in and out of your consciousness, but on some level it’ll still have you in its chilling, atmospheric vice grip. Following Andersson and Dreijer down such a labyrinthine rabbit hole would be difficult if they didn’t hook you from the start, but luckily the first three songs are among the most immediately arresting 25 minutes of music the Knife has ever made. “A Tooth for an Eye” almost feels like a belated, revisionist do-over of the band’s relatively unremarkable early work. While 2003's Deep Cuts sometimes struggled to find common ground between punk aggression and bright, calypso-tinged synths, “Tooth” ties these competing impulses together seamlessly as it also deftly weaves in a political message.
. In April 2013, Swedish electronic duo released, their first album in over seven years. This week, they return with, featuring reworked tracks from throughout their discography.
Before you head to your local record shop, however, the collection is streaming in full below (via ). The digital LP collects eight tracks that The Knife “reworked especially for the recent North American leg of their Shaking The Habitual tour,” according to a press release.
That includes “We Share Our Mothers’ Health” (2006’s ), “Bird” (2001’s ), “Got 2 Let U” (2003’s ), and more.