Yeah, as excited
as I was for this album, the consensus going around that there was going to be
a strongly political heft to it made me sceptical. I love The Knife as much as
anyone, but mainly for their strange and sinister synthpop, where concrete and
tangible ideas seem to get lost in the fog of the catchy dance rhythms and
menacing atmospherics, and while I appreciate the gender-bending aspects to
their image and sound and Karin Dreijer Andersson’s trans-androgynous
pitch-shifting, I’m not sure that Shaking
the Habitual is the intellectual statement on the group’s political views
that I think they might have intended. And if it is, it’s buried so deep under
a mound of byzantine inaccessibility that I’m perfectly comfortable with being
quite unable to ‘get it’. What I was expecting from this album wasn’t what it
would say to my brain but what it would say to my ears – and on a purely sonic
level, it’s a mixed bag, shifting between sounding frantically urgent and
solemnly doom-laden, pausing occasionally (but not always briefly) for some
ambient interludes, all the while balancing between exciting and tedious.
There’s a theme of
tension running through all the tracks on this album; the songs are brimming
with portent, and frequently sail off into some enjoyably dark territory.
Because that’s what I really enjoy about The Knife – revelling in their world
of weird foreboding, and having a little internal souldance at the same time. The
more danceable highlights include the awesomely frantic ‘Full of Fire’ – nine
minutes of industrially-driven madness – and several tracks make a show of the
duo’s love for the percussive, like the woodblock jungle of ‘A Tooth for an Eye’
and the tribal drumming of ‘Without You My Life Would Be Boring’. But it’s the
more oppressively sinister parts of the album that really stick a skewer into
your heart. ‘Wrap Your Arms Around Me’ is a track scarred with vulnerability, a
piece groaning with sexual malignance. But probably the most delectably bleak
corner of Shaking the Habitual can be
found in ‘A Cherry on Top’, which is a masterfully crafted vacuum of
foreboding. It has that gothic-insanity feel, like spending a night alone in a
madhouse. It’s just that sort of pantomime craziness that The Knife can pull
off spectacularly, not least because of Andersson’s shape-shifting, intensely
disquieting moan of a voice is one of the duo’s most powerful assets.
So, there’s a lot
of good here, sure. I like the earthy clunk and squeaky siren calls over ‘Raging
Lung’, a song that’s like travelling on a rusty tug over a misty ocean – I love
the spongy trumpet sound and the heave of the background’s metallic bass
snores. I like the introduction of other vocalists on ‘Stay Out Here’, the
album’s most conventionally house-y song, which I think really adds to its
unsettling power. All of this is well and good. But that’s not to say that this
is a good ‘album’. Part of the problem is that Shaking the Habitual is astonishingly long – way, way, way
overlong, which I think was a significant lapse of judgement on The Knife’s
part – this is not an album that should’ve been an hour and a half in length,
there’s just simply not enough material here to justify it. Especially considering
that most of the ‘material’ I’m talking about might not even be considered music. The album has long, ponderous
stretches of ambient noise and sound – two of the tracks here, ‘Crake’ and ‘Oryx’,
are short spurts of rubbish that seem to exist for no other reason than their
titles reference Margaret Atwood, thereby proving The Knife’s intellectual
credibility to absolutely no-one. ‘Old Dreams Waiting to be Realized’ is
probably the track you’d first notice as clocking in at nineteen minutes, and
consisting entirely of reasonably quiet and brain-calcifyingly boring sounds of not much in particular.
This, coupled with the needless and ineffective ‘Fracking Fluid Injection’ –
ten-ish minutes of irritatingly repetitive squeaking that goes nowhere – means that
at least half an hour of the album’s running time should’ve been snipped and
shelved and The Knife should admit defeat and concede that these wanderings of
madness stymie the album’s flow to a treacle-fast sludge.
But even with
these tedious missteps of arty nonsense gone, the album remains pretty
ineffectively paced, with even the best songs sometimes outstaying their
welcome and becoming a little bit tiring, even if the momentum behind the
tracks seemed so initially promising. The Knife are still cultivating some
pretty powerful sounds here. It’s definitely not as bad as my frustration may have made it out to
be, and when you skip all the boring bits, which are nicely organised into just
one or two tracks, it’s a real delight of pained terror and urgent post-pop fun.
But in many ways, the piece as an actual album is a failure, in that it’s
impossible to make heads or tails of the socio-political polemic that is
apparently somewhere to be found within it, and in that to listen to it all in
one go is one very long, very unfulfilling act of hardship bordering on
self-abuse. Saying that, however, I do recommend that you give it a listen, as
there’s goodness to be found within its depths, and The Knife may sometimes
stagger over to the wrong side of ‘arty’, but their unique talents are still
inspiring and often riveting. If you like the weird shit then you’ll definitely
be in luck here.
The Knife - 'Full of Fire'
The Knife - 'Full of Fire'
