Album Review: The Knife - Shaking the Habitual

As Karin Dreijer Anderson’s distinctive tribal howl echoes into focus in ‘A Tooth for an Eye’, the first track on Shaking the Habitual, listeners are already plunged into the startlingly unique and identifiable sound that has become known as the Knife. Just minutes into the first track, Anderson’s vocals seize your attention and grip it right up until the end of the album’s 96 minutes and 20 seconds, sounding for all the world like the prophetic ravings of a primitive witch being shrieked into the wind.

Anderson has had no trouble carving out a niche for herself as an original and exciting contemporary vocalist as the main woman of Fever Ray, the project she maintains alongside the Knife. On Shaking the Habitual, the haunting voice parts are twisted into unfamiliar new shapes, digitally distorted into a genderless cry fluctuating between icy and impassioned.

Channeling influences as diverse as Gang Gang Dance, Kate Bush and the soundtrack to the Lion King, the album signifies a departure from the poppy aesthetic heard in previous albums. It is the Knife’s most brazenly experimental material, peddling in white noise and vaguely terrifying samples that wouldn’t be out of place in an indie Japanese horror film.

Back in February the album’s second track ‘Full of Fire’ was wisely released as the teaser single for the album. It is a noisy, anxious trip into the dark heart of the album’s mysterious soundscape, resonating with harsh animalistic wails and compelled by an insistent, menacing beat. ‘Without You My Life Would be Boring’ is as fiercely euphoric and danceable as anything the Knife has ever produced, recalling the tuneful commerciality of ‘Heartbeats’.

‘Old Dreams Waiting to be Realized’ is the true revelation of the album, a 20 minute long centrepiece as gloomy and rotten sounding as the political rhetoric which has accompanied the album’s release. The album’s political significance is impossible to miss. If you don’t quite catch Karin’s warped cry: "let's talk about gender, baby/let's talk about you and me", the anti-Capitalist, anti-consumerist manifesto on the Knife’s website is there to hammer it home.

In Shaking the Habitual, the Swedish duo has proven yet again that there is more to them than press releases, cryptic videos and copious political ranting. The album could baffle and nonplus just as easily as it could be considered a masterpiece but it is, at the very least, certainly one of the most ingenious and innovative releases you will hear this year.

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