The rare band where “a handful of elf pee” is not someone on AZLyrics fucking up…
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Megan Harrington: The Knife are outstanding at maintaining the balance between feral and precocious. So many bands I loved in college have watched their artistic see-saw slide to the ground, but the Knife still know how to muck up their precociousness with percussion. They’ve (by design, I believe) avoided overexposure, so while “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” isn’t a radical leap from even “Heartbeats,” their consistency is a prize rather than the stale Cracker Jack.
[9]
Alfred Soto: This remix of a track on the Swedish group’s boring, interminable, often excellent Shaking the Habitual emphasizes a gypsy woodwind melody refracted through garbage can percussion and Karin Andersson’s talent for sounding like she’s herded several cats and fed them Meow Mix in her throat. Not particularly enjoyable but striking.
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Scott Mildenhall: Or in other words, “My Life Would Suck Without You.” A brilliant title, a specific but universal sentiment encapsulated in the simplest, biggest line of a massive singalong chorus of a massive singalong song. It’s everything The Knife seem actively against here, and that’s a shame. Inaccessibility isn’t a virtue, especially not if you’re trying to Say Something, but at least the relentless rattle runs counter to that. It might not have been the main objective, but catchiness it has.
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Patrick St. Michel: Shambles on a little too long and is ultimately sort of just discombobulated because why not? But the opening part, where it sounds like SNES music is exploding, is cool.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: It’s like the Knife recorded a baile funk track, pressed it to vinyl, smashed the record into pieces, scotch-taped it back together, and then played it at the wrong speed.
[3]
Brad Shoup: I don’t believe the title for a second, and I choose to hear Andersson trampling on it. I can get by on the two percussive chords, especially when they’re goosed by those pan pipes. Maybe the Kate Bush comparisons are stale, but surely not the credit?
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Katherine St Asaph: 1) The single version of “Without You My Life Would Be Boring,” from Shaken-Up Versions, is a dance remix, in that it was remixed and has a new loop that I can confirm thousands of people were able to hop around to (as close to dancing as Terminal 5 allows). But it’s not a dance remix. The original was the more kinetic of the two: a shaking thing, somewhere between rai and a tremor. It is its own shaken-up version — shaken-up like a seltzer bottle. That’s my soul. 2) Three songs sound like what I sound like inside. One is Patrick Kelleher’s “He Has to Sleep Sometime.” The second is “Full of Fire”; the third is this. You can’t bottle up this much shaky energy; it rattles the confines. The last time I visited my mother, she noticed my hands shaking. I hadn’t noticed until then. She told me to see a doctor. I told her to zoom in on my empty wallet, then Googled because that’s still free. It turns out there is a test for hand tremors. It’s called the paper test. Turn up your palms; place paper on palms; try not to breathe; see how much you’re shaking apart. (See also.) The remix, then, is like a paper test from a person so anxious she’s shaken the poor paper to shreds, and the little fibers jitter like inflatable dancing guys. Scary; also, so cool when you watch. 3) The Knife are funny. People forget that. “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” is funny because it is literally a song about drinking elf piss. It’s also about a world where it is fair and legit to draw personal symbolic meaning out of elf piss. But yo: elf pee! In the video dude holds up a little vial before playing a syringe flute and emptying a bedpan RIGHT IN DUDE’S FACE. Pans of poo, buckets of tiger pee. Bottoms up! (That can be symbolic too.) 4) The Knife are not sexy per se, but they talk about sex. What the fuck did you think “legs astride an axe to grind” was about? A revolution without self-love…. 5) Karin’s voice is high, but it is not inaccessible. That final la-a-a-a-st throbs like disco. She loops herself later on. These tricks are so cool when you hear them. 6) I’m not unbiased. Karin Dreijer saved my life in 2010: walking down Connor quad in the sort of snow that makes everything look sickly, clinging to “I’m Not Done,” its handclaps paced at the slow beat of survival instinct. Such things make you predisposed to love artists, particularly when they write lines like these. 7) Shaking the Habitual is a Message Album, no one’ll dispute that; it’s got Message Songs. People love two of them because they’re totally obvious: “Raging Lung” is the one that quotes Fugazi, “Ready to Lose” is the one that says “privilege.” But “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” is the one with “shaking the habitual,” and it’s the one with the thematic core: “I’m holding on forever, but how long will forever last?” Or: “What if we can’t make it, but we say that we can?” Think about it. It’s profoundly nilihistic. Or it’s profound optimism. What else does anyone have anymore?
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