It’s been seven years since Silent Shout -- the last album from Swedish brother-sister duo The Knife-- a silence that acts as a statement as wells as a shadow over their new album Shaking The Habitual. There wasn’t just static on Karin Dreijer and Olof Andersson’s end, Karin released a terrific album under the Fever Ray guise, as well as scoring an opera with Olof, Tomorrow In A Year. But to come back as The Knife is a declaration of intent to use the resources and reach that name provides. The result is an hour and half double album that is almost impenetrable, a purposefully massive album that can wear you down as much as it can provide truly great moments.
Shaking The Habitual is reminiscent of David Bowie’s Berlin cocaine comedown masterpiece Low. That album has a definitive A and B-side, a difference in tone that’s as surprising now as it must have been when it was released in 1977. While side A is stocked with well-crafted pop songs like “Be My Wife” and “Sound and Vision,” side B is a sonic wasteland more in the vein of Low collaborator Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. Bowie’s “Warszawa” is meant to provoke the feeling of post-war Warsaw, its isolation and ruined landscape with horror-show synths and multi-tracked monk chants. It’s a desperately lonely track and a feeling that The Knife provoke frequently on Shaking The Habitual as they switch from tracks with a more traditional pop-structure to sonic texture.
The brightest track on Shaking The Habitual is also its first track, a way to ease into the murk to come. The track swirls and chimes until it reaches a climax, “I’m telling you stories/ trust me.” The band is heavily concerned with doubt, whether doubting your sources or your own motives. Karin explains in a rare interview, with Pitchfork, “It's important to question my story and my way of telling it, too. It's good to ask questions instead of serving answers.” It presents the album as open, something that will shed and accept meaning as people listen to it years from now. Compared to the rest of the album, it’s almost bubble-gum, like the threatening “Stay Out Here.” It’s Olofs only vocal appearance on the album, his and Karin’s voices weaving in and out of each other’s way. Something potentially beautiful, like harmony, is rejected for the mechanic grind that suffocates the track.
There is no “Heartbeats” on the album—the single that brought The Knife’s warped perception of what a torch song could be to dance floors and house parties—but there are moments of reprieve. Following the almost 20 minute “Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized,” a soul-less digital nightmare, is the first half of “Raging Lung,” a thrillingly percussive melancholic pop song that takes shape until it eventually disintegrates into something broken once again. After the fatiguing “Old Dreams” Karin’s vocals are a relief, a human voice to cling to in the darkness The Knife use as a default palette on Shaking The Habitual. On “Raging Lung” Karin sings on the chorus “And that’s when it hurts / When you see the difference.” She’s talking about economic inequality but singing with the affected tone usually reserved for the ache of unrequited love. Shaking The Habitual is an unrelentingly serious album, less about human interaction than their unequal relationship to government and power.
The Knife position themselves as more of an idea than a band, a microphone for their intellectual curiosity. In the past they’ve hidden their faces behind masks, attempting to supersede traditional promotional necessities by refusing to smile or brood in front of a camera for a magazine. In the end, the masks became just as big of a promotional tool, mysterious siblings from Sweden who didn’t show their face and rarely play live. There’s an attempt on Shaking The Habitual to rid themselves of those anxieties, in the Pitchfork interview, “This album plays around with questions and issues that we have been dealing with from the beginning, in a way, but it is much more on a structural level rather than a psychological level.” It creates an album that even when you can nod along to it, like on “Full Of Fire”, it reveals itself as a theoretical knot, a textbook to be deciphered. You realize you’re singing along to a scowling indictment of the straight white male hierarchy present in education and government.
In a bizarre video released alongside the album, the duo gives some insight into their process and motivation through gauzy cuts and sporadic vocal overdubs revealing they wanted to replace the “boundary between normal and strange.” The album is constantly testing boundaries and patience, a battle that creates a creeping unsettling feeling. It’s never comfortable but that’s exactly what they wanted.
Grade: B+
Nick, this is a great review. Thank you for taking it so seriously!