Kicking against mainstream pop convention, The Knife enter a realm of paganIndustrial electro experiments. By Britt Brown
Swinging into action: Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer
The Knife Shaking The Habitual Rabid/Brille/Mute CD/DL/3×LP Mystique has always been a coveted commodity in music, but few in recent times have maximised its potential as rigorously as Swedish sibling duo The Knife. Since forming the group in 1999, vocalist/lyricist Karin Dreijer Andersson and her brother, beat-constructor Olof Dreijer, have taken to using public gestures as opportunities to spark intrigue, foment controversy, and confuse – boycotting the 2003 Swedish Grammys with a surreal protest against music industry sexism, leaking cryptic statements to the press, and donning bizarre garb for press photos (including Venetian masks and gymnast outfits). True mystique demands this sort of method acting, sustaining the illusion until the person becomes the persona.
The drawback is that the pranks often end up overshadowing the actual music. But with Shaking The Habitual, for the first time, the sounds speak loudest. The Knife’s first proper album in over half a decade, following the intimate, alien electronic terrain of 2006’s Silent Shout, is an ambitiously deranged wasteland of pagan-Industrial electro experiments, a sprawling triple LP that clocks in at a meaty 98 minutes. In a presumably self-written faux-Beat manifesto accompanying the release, the group lay out an array of agitations and fascinations that birthed the new record. They take issue with “manufactured knowledge”, “blood systems promoting biology as destiny”, Monsanto,
fracking, “terminal seeds”, and of course “hyper-capitalism”. They pose rhetorical questions such as “How do you build an album about not knowing?” and “All over the dance floor we’re asking: can this DNA turn into something else?” Most tellingly of all, there is a repeated slogan: “No habits!”
This aversion to routine expresses itself through playing with time and texture. Six of the 13 songs stretch past the eight minute mark (“Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized” is an epic 19 minutes) and, unlike their previous, purely synthetic albums, there’s a notable emphasis on acoustic instrumentation, which is made explicit in the rambling sleevenotes: “Electronic is just one place in the body. We went temporarily acoustic.” Marrying Dreijer Andersson’s swooping, possessed soothsayer vocals to quasi-African amplified percussion (“A Tooth For An Eye”), cavernously reverbed harpsichord (“A Cherry On Top”), or choirs of dissonant flutes and rattling drum circle percussion (“Without You My Life Would Be Boring”) opens up weird, virgin realms of sound.
Even on the slightly more familiar dark electronic cuts (“Wrap Your Arms Around Me”, “Stay Out Here”) they layer alienating pitchshifted shrieks or drop into abrupt passages of negative space or frenetic electrical outbursts, sabotaging any lingering structures of pop. Several tracks sound like outright Neubauten worship: smouldering voiceless vistas of abstract haze and distant scraping metal. In typically perverse Knife style, the only semblance of a single, the sensual, forlorn ballad, “Ready
To Lose”, is hidden away as the final song on the record.
Like everything else about the group, Shaking The Habitual is acutely selfconscious. Each song is composed like a confrontational psychodrama, and the memorable melodies and A-to-B emotional crescendos of Silent Shout are gone. This continues a trajectory away from the conventions of the mainstream which began in the mid-2000s. Around the time of 2003’s Deep Cuts, the group were still peddling catchy Cyndi Lauper-style electronic pop. Their single “Heartbeats” was played and licensed heavily, and that seemed to instil in them a permanent aversion to the machinations of the music business. In Dreijer Andersson’s words: “Having done that, we felt we’d lost the music.”
Since then, each new project has reflected a wilful refusal to slip into stasis (or success). Like Björk, Antony And The Johnsons, Lil B, even Radiohead, there’s a sense of them reacting against mainstream acceptance, thriving on the tension it brings, and staging some kind of protest against it. “Music can be so meaningless,” the text accompanying the teaser video for the new record complains. “We had to find lust.” Shaking The Habitual is the logical conclusion of this kick against convention. It’s a situational protest against the vapidity of the contemporary music world, a confounding of expectations, and an attack on preconceived ideas about the group’s style and limitations. It’s inscrutable and inspired, and this time mystique has nothing to do with it.
The Knife | Soundcheck | The Wire |
Swinging into action: Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer
The Knife Shaking The Habitual Rabid/Brille/Mute CD/DL/3×LP Mystique has always been a coveted commodity in music, but few in recent times have maximised its potential as rigorously as Swedish sibling duo The Knife. Since forming the group in 1999, vocalist/lyricist Karin Dreijer Andersson and her brother, beat-constructor Olof Dreijer, have taken to using public gestures as opportunities to spark intrigue, foment controversy, and confuse – boycotting the 2003 Swedish Grammys with a surreal protest against music industry sexism, leaking cryptic statements to the press, and donning bizarre garb for press photos (including Venetian masks and gymnast outfits). True mystique demands this sort of method acting, sustaining the illusion until the person becomes the persona.
The drawback is that the pranks often end up overshadowing the actual music. But with Shaking The Habitual, for the first time, the sounds speak loudest. The Knife’s first proper album in over half a decade, following the intimate, alien electronic terrain of 2006’s Silent Shout, is an ambitiously deranged wasteland of pagan-Industrial electro experiments, a sprawling triple LP that clocks in at a meaty 98 minutes. In a presumably self-written faux-Beat manifesto accompanying the release, the group lay out an array of agitations and fascinations that birthed the new record. They take issue with “manufactured knowledge”, “blood systems promoting biology as destiny”, Monsanto,
fracking, “terminal seeds”, and of course “hyper-capitalism”. They pose rhetorical questions such as “How do you build an album about not knowing?” and “All over the dance floor we’re asking: can this DNA turn into something else?” Most tellingly of all, there is a repeated slogan: “No habits!”
This aversion to routine expresses itself through playing with time and texture. Six of the 13 songs stretch past the eight minute mark (“Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized” is an epic 19 minutes) and, unlike their previous, purely synthetic albums, there’s a notable emphasis on acoustic instrumentation, which is made explicit in the rambling sleevenotes: “Electronic is just one place in the body. We went temporarily acoustic.” Marrying Dreijer Andersson’s swooping, possessed soothsayer vocals to quasi-African amplified percussion (“A Tooth For An Eye”), cavernously reverbed harpsichord (“A Cherry On Top”), or choirs of dissonant flutes and rattling drum circle percussion (“Without You My Life Would Be Boring”) opens up weird, virgin realms of sound.
Even on the slightly more familiar dark electronic cuts (“Wrap Your Arms Around Me”, “Stay Out Here”) they layer alienating pitchshifted shrieks or drop into abrupt passages of negative space or frenetic electrical outbursts, sabotaging any lingering structures of pop. Several tracks sound like outright Neubauten worship: smouldering voiceless vistas of abstract haze and distant scraping metal. In typically perverse Knife style, the only semblance of a single, the sensual, forlorn ballad, “Ready
To Lose”, is hidden away as the final song on the record.
Like everything else about the group, Shaking The Habitual is acutely selfconscious. Each song is composed like a confrontational psychodrama, and the memorable melodies and A-to-B emotional crescendos of Silent Shout are gone. This continues a trajectory away from the conventions of the mainstream which began in the mid-2000s. Around the time of 2003’s Deep Cuts, the group were still peddling catchy Cyndi Lauper-style electronic pop. Their single “Heartbeats” was played and licensed heavily, and that seemed to instil in them a permanent aversion to the machinations of the music business. In Dreijer Andersson’s words: “Having done that, we felt we’d lost the music.”
Since then, each new project has reflected a wilful refusal to slip into stasis (or success). Like Björk, Antony And The Johnsons, Lil B, even Radiohead, there’s a sense of them reacting against mainstream acceptance, thriving on the tension it brings, and staging some kind of protest against it. “Music can be so meaningless,” the text accompanying the teaser video for the new record complains. “We had to find lust.” Shaking The Habitual is the logical conclusion of this kick against convention. It’s a situational protest against the vapidity of the contemporary music world, a confounding of expectations, and an attack on preconceived ideas about the group’s style and limitations. It’s inscrutable and inspired, and this time mystique has nothing to do with it.
The Knife | Soundcheck | The Wire |