Album Review: The Knife - Shaking The Habitual

The first three albums by Swedish brother and sister duo The Knife were a dizzying ride of experimental soundscapes that had no beginning or end and synth pop classics like Lasagne from the 2001 self-titled debut and its more sophisticated reimagining, Heartbeats, from 2003's Deep Cuts. The vocals of Karin Dreijer Andersson are a common thread, whether crooning like an accented Cyndi Lauper or growling like some kind of pitch-shifted demon.

First single, Full Of Fire, sets a template that the more traditional songs on the record all use. The drumming is heavily effected and centre stage. The rhythms seem lifted from that kind of frenetic street performer style of drumming you see getting bashed out by buskers on rubbish bins and buckets and things. Rapid tapping at un-quantized out-of-time intervals from synthesisers fills out the sound, with big bass synths warping in and out. Without You My Life Would Be Nothing builds on this with more tribal drumming elements included, but the basic premise is the same. Counterpointing this fast urgency of much of the record, Shaking The Habitual regularly drops off into ambient sprawling without derailing the common threads that make it work so well. The third track in, A Cherry On Top, seems like elements ripped from the rest of the record, flipped backwards and layered into sound art. It's these sections that give the rest of the record their weight.

It's a ridiculously hard album to describe in mere words, as the sounds themselves so rarely offer convenient comparisons. This of course is one of the main successes of this group, and why their continued experiments keep resulting in genius.