The Knife ‘Shaking the Habitual’ Album Review

It’s been seven years since the last proper release from The Knife, during which the brother-sister duo of Olof Deijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson have stayed busy and kept their fans interested with various side-projects. Like their collaborative opera with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, Tomorrow, In a Year, and then there were Olof’s solo EP’s, and Karin’s stellar jungle-goth release, Fever Ray. Though they haven’t exactly disappeared from the music scene, a growing and impassioned fanbase has been clamouring for a true The Knife record, and now that it’s here we can safely say that it probably isn’t what anybody was waiting for.

Which is not a bad thing, except maybe in retrospect when one comes to realize they didn’t have to wait at all. If you are one of those fans who overlooked Tomorrow, In a Year you might want to go back and listen to it, because that is what The Knife sounds like these days. Shaking the Habitual has a lot in common with that experiment and bears almost no similarity to Deep Cuts or Silent Shout. It may take some getting used to for the synth-pop core of their fanbase, but give it a chance, and when you’re done you might want to have a look at those suddenly more Knife-like projects of the past few years.

Opener ‘A Tooth For An Eye’ incorporates Fever Ray’s tribal sound seamlessly into the higher energy realm of The Knife. As a song it goes almost nowhere, but the sounds are so textured and primally compelling that I don’t seem to care. It’s a great introduction for this record, easing fans in with something they can at least dance to, but has threads of those recent influences and hints at the dark place all of this is heading for.

‘Full of Fire’ packs a bassy punch, making use of just about every trick in the Dubstep recipe book without being, even a little bit, a dubstep track. They have their own freneticism, rubber duckies or squeaking balloons, wailing cries and other noises to drive this song hard into your temple. It’s almost an overdose, almost mocking the current EDM scene, but that is also par for the course from a band that has never seemed to take anything absolutely seriously.

This is where the true, black and fetid core of the record begins to emerge. It would make a certain kind of sense for The Knife to call an experimental creepshow like this ‘A Cherry On Top’. The long intro emulates sirens, with ambience so textured the track starts to resemble a radio play. When the song proper begins the same sounds are reborn, translated into a metallic guitar suite, out of tune and all over the place. The level of psychosis this album has induced up to this point should have most listeners prepared for it, in which case it’s the highlight of the record. Maybe. Seriously.

And this really is a psychotic record. It’s not all dark, because Karin and Olof really can’t help but be playful and mocking, but it’s dark enough to stain you for a day or two. It is far and away their most experimental album, and keep in mind that The Knife has not been shy about experimenting in the past. That playfulness translates to their musicality as they mess with industrial sounds, compositional rules, and mainly, with you. Don’t expect synthpop. Don’t expect anything, actually. They have sometimes been a silly band, but this album is a work of art.

Shaking the Habitual transitions quickly from its initial all-out sonic assault and into a more meditative mode. Quickly being a relative term, with the first four tracks running about half an hour. These two discs run longer than an hour and a half, and with just 13 songs you can expect at least a few of them to run around 10 minutes, with one approaching 20. These shifts in tone though feel like movements, and that makes it work if you endeavour to sit and wade through the whole thing with the same respect you would give to reading a book or watching a film.

The second half of the album feels like an alternate universe, with a structure very similar to the first and songs that seem to reflect their counterparts from act one. Things get a bit moodier here, and while you could still call these songs psychotic they aren’t as frenetic or, to my ear, as difficult to parse.

‘Networking’ is a phenomenal instrumental number, even if many of the instruments are human voices, modulated and sliced up. I really like this one, and I think it best exemplifies the direction The Knife has gone in, as a highly playful and experimental song, but one where their playful nature with music is taken to a dark, ambient place that is ultimately very serious and artistic. In the past they might have made a joke out of it.

‘Stay Out Here’ visits that same foreboding landscape, but at almost 11 minutes in length it accomplishes a whole lot less than the shorter ‘Networking’, and is the only song on the record I don’t really see the point to.

Remarkable that a psychotic album feels cohesive, but it does. Though it is much more likely that people will hear this one played in the background while they work on their own art, the experience of at least one full and attentive listen is worth setting aside time for.