“After 15 re-designs to get the Marmife just right, I think we’ve finally done it…”
[Video][Website]
[6.64]
Iain Mew: After “Full of Fire” announced The Knife’s return and the scale of their ambitions in spectacular style, is this the friendlier follow-up to get wider love? Not really. It’s a more manageable length, but there’s still too much going on to get a handle on, and it has its abrasive moments — mostly from Karin Dreijer Andersson’s voice — but they’re just a bit more spread out. That’s what leaves the song slightly disappointing, though it has enough dazzlingly pretty moments to keep up my anticipation for the album. It feels like a sacrifice of some of the force of “Full of Fire” without gaining much catchiness or coherence in return — best represented by the endings; where “Full of Fire” hit a breathtaking final twist, “A Tooth for an Eye” just kind of ambles nicely to a close.
[6]
Jer Fairall: Like Lloyd Bridges in Airplane! picking the wrong day to stop sniffing glue, I feel like I sure picked the wrong song to start trying to fathom The Knife. The relative approachability of “Full of Fire” felt like it might finally offer a portal into the mind of these beloved eccentrics. “A Tooth for an Eye,” though, is all jerky near-polyrhythms, defiantly amelodic vocals and a willful discordance between any two musical elements present at any time during the track’s shapeless six-minutes. Kudos to them, I suppose, for being possibly the single most avant-garde thing to currently warrant reasonably popular attention, like the rare modern art exhibit that actually manages to sell tickets, but my impulse here is still to squint hard for a second, shrug and then move on.
[4]
Brad Shoup: In writing a piece on Björk, I was reminded about how, even among her devotees, she’s still an Icelandic ice queen, an artist whose caprice exceeds mortal bounds. That’s bullshit, and it diminishes both her sonic accomplishments and the paydirt vein of humanity and domesticity running through her catalog. I wonder if it applies to Scandinavian music as a whole. I didn’t care for the first Knife single, but as it suggested a demonic Manhattan loft rather than mystic permafrost, perhaps it was a necessary corrective. I love the confidence here: to fold polyrhythms into each other, to keep that laconic synth from taking over the track, to let the vocals push this thing to the next level. This seems more major each time I listen.
[9]
Anthony Easton: The percussion on this is really complicated, and quite difficult, working between noise and free jazz. The organic and the electronic add tension to each other. I don’t like the vocals.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: The dance of audio referents in the mix is hyper-dense and emotionally stunning. Normally I would never advocate a woman’s voice being stripped from an electronic track, but I’m not sure Karin’s witchy vowel-elongations added much this time around.
[7]
Alfred Soto: I quite like Laurie Anderson’s eighties records, and theoretically the electronic “tribal” percussion and atmospherics make for a fecund ecosystem in which Karin Dreijer can wail like a rare bird. How much longer this act can push its schtick depends on its access to found sounds like this.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Gamelan, buried scratchy synths, Karin Dreijer roaring quotes from The Passion, no cheap hook, and generally everything I want. Almost. I want a lyric sheet, and I want The Knife to record their way through my entire library. What would they do with Under the Skin or The Edible Woman or The Changeling (counter-argument: that was Fever Ray)?
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: No idea what’s being said — even the people behind this dedicated Knife Wiki are more than a bit uncertain — but you can rest assured that it is definitely, totally and completely profound. This is thankfully not as long as and less abrasive than “Full Of Fire” but still quite long and quite abrasive. That comes with the territory. It’s a cliche, and it’s a cop-out that betrays interpretive ineptitude, inarticulacy and a complete lack of imagination, but this sort of thing is what the phrase “dancing about architecture” was made for.
[5]
Will Adams: More than any other act, The Knife has made me feel in over my head, as if I’m missing something important that my ears are too dense to pick up. Am I just not working hard enough? Or is this just that inaccessible? “A Tooth for an Eye” is pretty in places, like around the 1:45 mark when even more percussion pools around the gamelan base, but nearly incomprehensible when Karin starts croaking again. I have to wonder if the listener should carry the bulk of the weight.
[5]
Ian Mathers: You know the Knife are on to something… interesting when the singles from Shaking the Habitual so far have made people refer to Silent Shout and Fever Ray as poppy by comparison. Something tells me that when we’ve all heard the album we’re going to find the idea of carving little bits off of it for videos kind of weird in retrospect.
[7]
Sabina Tang: Recently I read Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s account of how he and five other Scandinavians with underdeveloped senses of self-preservation sailed a balsa wood raft from Peru to Tahiti in support of a wacky archaeological theory. It made me think a few times of The Knife: not only by association with Darwin’s sea voyages, but because in their own domain, the Dreijer siblings seem not unlike Heyerdahl’s motley crew of archeologists, artists, and WWII Resistance radio operators. They go about their life’s work in the absence of some subtle constraint of which the rest of us are barely cognizant — and there’s nothing wrong with them, so draw your own conclusion. Not that The Knife need to invoke the Galapagos to sketch a compelling landscape. The polyrhythmic percussion and Southeast Asian melodies of “A Tooth for an Eye” hark back to “Colouring of Pigeons,” but the lyrics hinge on the near-now (“January 2012”), on kids and flowers and shopping carts. “I’m telling you stories,” sings Karin, “trust me” — a cry that expires in raggedness, breath gone — stories that, as always, comprise both domesticity and strangeness. Tomorrow, In a Year, too, was about kids; beaches and letters and behind the house a gentle cooing. In this sense, Shaking The Habitual is their most forthrightly descriptive album title.
[9]