Just keep on rolling with these blog posts I guess.
I'm finding music hard to write about. I either feel like I'm being too general about how something sounds or what is good or not about it, or I feel like I get so detailed that it's a pain to read. Let's see if this works.
The Knife, for those of you who don't know, are a brother/sister duo from Sweden who make dark synth driven grooves. They broke through (spawning tons of dark-synth-pop wannabes) with their third album, 2006's Silent Shout. Philosophically, being a big band doesn't seem to jive with these siblings, because after Silent Shout blew up they split up to follow solo paths (one result of which was the awesomely bizarre Fever Ray record). When they did return together as the Knife, instead of making a logical follow up to everything they had done so far, they made a bizarre electro-opera which tied Darwin's life to the evolution of life on Earth. Strange, long, with few driving beats, it was super interesting, and alienating. But now they've made the huge, double disc monstrosity Shaking the Habitual, which both sounds like the proper follow up to Silent Shout/Fever Ray, but also shows that their dabbling in evolution seems to have had an impact.
This is an incredible record, currently my top contender for Album of the Year. The album kicks off with three back to back great tunes over 24 minutes. "A Tooth For An Eye" kicks it off, taking tight rhythms and bright sounds and managing to make them creepy. "Full of Fire" throws out any pretense of normalness with a huge banger of a track which distorts and disintegrates over nearly ten minutes, never slowing it's pace but never feeling too repetitive. Karin (the sister/lead singer) makes her voice distort and crack through both vocal and digital manipulation, sounding like a little girl one moment and an old man the next - climaxing with her yelling "Let's talk about gender baby, let's talk about you and me" in a deep baritone which can barely hold itself together. And then another shift to "Cherry on Top", which begins with 5 minutes of really cool droning noise which wouldn't be out of place on The Seer (one of last year's favourite albums), then morphs into a creepy little nursery rhyme, and then back into creaking drones.
If all this record gave me was these three songs, it would be enough to put this album in my top ten of the year. The intricate rhythms, the amazing sonic manipulations, everything I love about these guys, summed up nicely in 24 exciting minutes. But it doesn't stop there, that's not even half of the first disc!
The rest of the album is in turns exciting, terrifying, meditative, and actively disconcerting. They also get outside of just electronic sounds on this record - it is called Shaking the Habitual after all. Without "You My Life Would Be Boring" has flute playing that reminds me of some of the weirder jazz records Don Cherry and Sun Ra recorded in the early 70s. There are tribal drum jams (closer to what was on Fever Ray) and there are weird chirping noise tracks. The record paces itself well, with tracks ranging from under a minute in length to nearly twenty minutes, and nothing is ever boring, or ever rehashed. Despite the fact that the basic elements are mostly represented in the first three songs, all of those elements take on new faces which themselves take on new masks. You can tell that this album came out of restless creative energy, but the best part is, it not only was born there, but it furthers the cause: of pushing and striving and destroying any and all boxes which might inhibit the minds growth.
Rating: 7.5/10 (Great +)
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