The Knife are the Radiohead of the electronic music genre. They are all about the unconventional. The last we heard from this Swedish brother and sister duo was in 2010 with their collaborative album Tomorrow, In a Year, which was done with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock. Seven years is a quite a lengthy amount of time to wait between proper studio releases, but it doesn’t take long listening to their new studio album Shaking the Habitual to realize that they like doing things the unconventional way.
Speaking of unconventional, when was the last time you listened to an album that was over 96 minutes long? Not ever? Me neither. That is just one of the ways that Shaking the Habitual delivers. It is over an hour and a half of pure appealing weirdness and haunting soundscapes. Tracks range from the 37secondlong “Oryx” to the 19minutelong “Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized”, the latter of which would be perfect as the soundtrack to a black and white zombie movie.
Some of the songs on Shaking the Habitual are rather light and groove oriented, like the opener “A Tooth For an Eye”, and others exhibit the dark and foreboding sound that The Knife are better known for, such as the latter half of “A Cherry On Top”. These tracks are great examples of how you get the best of both worlds with this album.
It’s clear that musically The Knife are out to simply do what works best for them. Their songs are the epitome of quirky, yet they have always been oddly appealing. That is a good quality to have in today’s music industry. Obviously, they aren’t out to win a Grammy award for Best Electronica Album (is that even a category?), but that is what makes them The Knife. And The Knife make good music. There is a whole other level of interpretation behind their music, which is mostly political and is easy to get lost in a tailspin when you begin reading up on it. For our intents and purposes, we’ll say that they make good music and leave it at that.
The Knife – A Cherry On Top
