Knife - A Blade in the Dark

In a world built on influences, references, quotations, if not outright shameless revivalism, Knife are among the very few acts who have never sounded like anyone else, and who have never been imitated by anyone else either.

Let me explain. After more than a decade of activity, Knife have earned a place in the pantheon of sacred duos of electronic music, alongside Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, Boards of Canada, Air and the like. Knife have stunned critics and audiences alike (Resident Advisor placed Silent Shout among the 10 best albums of the entire 2000s) with a sound that is instantly recognizable, yet constantly evolving. Starting out with the throbbing adolescent dreams collected on The Knife, siblings Olof and Karin Dreijer gave voice to the sad, rebellious twentysomethings of Deep Cuts, watched them grow into the icy rage of Silent Shout, and age into the painful rebellion of their latest work, Shaking The Habitual. But let's take it step by step.

Their first, self-titled album, a self-released effort from 2001 largely ignored at the time, already shows the jagged traits of the Dreijer siblings. Three elements: 1) A straight, low, techno kick drum. Olof is a DJ, and rhythm is essential to all his songs. 2) The first voice: Karin's bittersweet one, which sometimes screams, sometimes whispers, but always hypnotizes with melodies that, even when not catchy or pop, are invariably memorable. The same cannot be said of the lyrics, which veer between delirious, shocking and sarcastic. 3) The second voice, the semi-human one of the synthesizers: it's this third element that completes Knife and makes them so hard to imitate. The synthesizers are never the same twice. Sometimes they follow the main melody, sometimes they challenge it. They are the purest expression of the band's compositional creativity, and they carry the listener through a whirlwind of unpredictable emotions. If some music seems made to simply let yourself drift along with it, Knife's songs instead lead the listener to one very specific place — one they might not even want to go.

The Knife is a seemingly playful record, with exhilarating moments like "Kino", followed by chilling dirges like "I Just Had To Die" (with heavy allusions to pedophilia, such as: "Watching schoolgirls on their knees"). Knife are an openly "political" band. Even lyrics and melodies that seem lighthearted hide messages of social critique. No subject is off-limits. Sexual perversions above all, but also pure socialism, protest in the name of social equality (this album marks the first appearance of the line "and we raise our head for the color red", later made famous by the hit single from the following record). The Knife is a little gem of an album. Despite a few rough edges, it's the perfect introduction to the sound of the "knife siblings", and perhaps their most unorthodox record.

Deep Cuts came out two years later, and it was a huge hit thanks to two outstanding singles: "Heartbeats" and "You Take My Breath Away". Karin and Olof told the press they wanted to make a very accessible record in order to spread their political message to as many people as possible. The result, perhaps unexpectedly, is one of the finest electro-pop albums ever made. "Heartbeats" is an instant classic, a generational anthem danced to in both bedrooms and nightclubs, and it turned the duo from an unknown Swedish ensemble into a worldwide phenomenon. Listen to the acoustic version of "Heartbeats", covered by indie introspective artist José Gonzales, to grasp firsthand the quality of this song, whose melody is utterly timeless and could have been written by Neil Young or Simon & Garfunkel. Not even Daft Punk can boast a universal anthem like "Heartbeats". And the best was yet to come.

Deep Cuts, despite having a clearly eighties theme both visually (unforgettable is the back cover showing Karin and Olof dressed up as a Seoul '88 coach and gymnast) and sonically, is an eclectic album, bursting with songs (a full 17 of them) and ideas. It's hard to pick favorites among so many gems, but worth mentioning is the third single, "Pass This On", featuring a spine-tingling falsetto and one of the finest music videos ever made, with drag queen Rickard Engfors performing at the saddest of local football club reunions.

Deep Cuts alternates moments of pure poetry (“This Is Now,” “Rock Classics”), outbursts of social protest (just look at the scathing critique of the police in “The Cop”) and genuine calls to arms (“Listen Now”). Amid this tangle of '80s synths, dreamlike atmospheres and driving techno, Knife paint an extremely accurate picture of a generation that's intelligent, yet bored, repressed and deeply ill at ease in an orderly, bourgeois world. Deep Cuts wants to be the knife that tears through the veil of a predictable life, and not without pain. Musically, it's a record that always seems out of step with the times and yet still manages to astonish and seduce with every listen. If you like Knife, Deep Cuts is the album of love at first sight. As Karin sings in “You Take My Breath Away”: “I heard you for the first time on the radio/ When I was going somewhere in a car/ You touched my heart, like a knife that’s very sharp”.

The Dreijer siblings reacted to the fame brought on by Deep Cuts in the most extreme way. They shut themselves away for months in an abandoned church, and recorded Silent Shout, released in 2006. They put on a new mask — literally: they appeared hooded in the snow with long black beaks, like grim Venetian carnival masks. It's immediately clear that the fluorescent tones of Deep Cuts are a world away from the dark, frightening ones of this third album, widely regarded as their mature masterpiece.

Silent Shout is a musically very complex record. The arrangements are tribal and icy at once, with sharp, insistent synthesizers set against vocal melodies that are themselves filtered and dehumanized, to the point of sounding like the voices of ghosts. The songs stretch out, abandoning conventional structures and choruses to make room for digital marches. There are a few tracks that could pass as singles — "Neverland", "Marble House" and "Like A Pen", for instance — but every song here carries an emotional weight. Anthems, yes, but anthems to something mysterious, cruel and ineffable. Silent Shout is the de-evolution of the generation portrayed on Deep Cuts. Those young people are now sad thirtysomethings living in a grey world, searching for new means of escape, only to find... the TV ("From Off To On"). The lyrics are cryptic, at times unsettling. "Spending time with my family / Like the Corleones", Karin announces triumphantly on "One Hit".

Silent Shout isn't an album for every taste. All at once, it feels long and demanding — the classic "great, but I'll never listen to it again" record — and many listeners instead take refuge in the gentler sound of Fever Ray (Karin's solo project), which plays like a softened-down version of Silent Shout. But for the more attentive and daring listener, this record offers up sonic orgasms (take, at random, the rubbery bassline of "We Share My Mother's Health") and a raw sonic power that will twist your guts into knots.

Knife spent the summer of 2006 presenting Silent Shout live, with visual effects by Andreas Nillsson. I experienced it live myself, but I won't describe it here — you can see it in "Silent Shout – An Audio-Visual Experience". I'll just say that while Daft Punk donned spacesuits and performed inside a giant pyramid for their "Alive Tour", all Knife needed was a leotard and some 3D face paint to leave a lasting impression.

Then, silence. The Dreijers went their separate ways. Karin focused on Fever Ray, Olof on his career as a DJ. They briefly reunited in 2010 for the soundtrack to the opera Tomorrow In A Year, together with fellow Swede Janine Rostron/Planningtorock and Matthew Sims/Mount Sims. A hybrid, oddball album, with Olof composing abrasive music inspired by the sounds of wild animals, and Karin lending her voice only sparingly. A decidedly difficult listen, reserved for completist fans or lovers of experimental opera.

It seemed to be over, until this year's teaser video: “Music can be so meaningless/ We had to find lust/ We asked our friends and lovers to help us”. This time Olof and Karin don't even bother with the masks. They vanish entirely, replaced by actors who look like they stepped straight out of a Lynch film, an army summoned specifically to shake us out of our everyday lives: Shaking The Habitual, indeed, is Knife's fourth album and the unsettling follow-up to Silent Shout.

The first single, "Full Of Fire", speaks for the whole record: song structure abandoned altogether, psychedelic techno marches, and an entirely new, openly experimental approach to sound, one that clearly bears the influence of Olof Dreijer's latest productions (mimicking Amazonian birdcalls with synthesizers) and of Rostron's cybernetic hypnotics. An album where "the distinction between strange and normal is erased", and instruments are used in unconventional ways. The intent, as ever, is political: what would a protest song sound like today? The result is an album that attacks convention from multiple angles — compositional, lyrical and visual: the accompanying booklet features an unsettling cartoon titled "End Extreme Wealth", depicting the wealthy as chronically ill patients.

The videos accompanying the singles “Full Of Fire” and “A Tooth For An Eye” point the finger at sexual conformism and the hypocrisy of social policies. In short, a subversive record, and if you don't feel equally subversive, you won't like it.

Once again, though, the Knife's music manages to “touch your heart like a very sharp knife”. Impossible to remain indifferent.

Of a rather different nature, even if orbiting around themes very close to those of the parent band, is Karin Dreijer's solo venture under the moniker Fever Ray, which began in 2009 with the self-titled debut. Fever Ray, released on Cooperative Music/V2, is truly a crash course in the darkest side of the Scandinavian world. A subtle mystery, with multifaceted implications. The ten tracks (adding up to almost fifty minutes in total) open with the vibrant, visionary nocturnal drone of “If I Had A Heart”, which unfolds between filtered voices and murky atmospheres. The following “When I Grow Up”, redolent of Goldfrapp in their “Felt Mountain” period, shifts gear, moving between sweet synth textures and Karin's utterly distinctive voice. And while “Dry And Dust” hints at synthetic openings, “Seven” achieves pop perfection: unwinding through gentle tribal-tinged beats and a dreamy voice set against hazy synth structures, it grows ever sweeter, until it vanishes over the horizon.

Trip-hop isn't that far off either: listening to “Concrete Walls” is like stepping back some fifteen years, to the nocturnal allure of Massive Attack's “Protection”. And amid dark echoes and electronic arrangements of heavenly sweetness, one catches hints of a distant allure: such is the case with the desperate “I'm Not Done”, in which Karin screams out her despair (her lyrics often take the form of political invective) in a sonic climax as simple as it is compelling. And while the bland “Keep Streets Empty For Me” is a strong candidate for the record's weak link, in the feisty closer “Coconut” the Nordic Valkyrie, bolstered by a considerably more driving rhythm section, delivers a vibrant finale.

Fever Ray thus tells the story of the north, its contours, its landscapes, its moods. Playing with synths, effect-laden guitars and an abundance of keyboards, it paints a vivid, vital picture that breathes new life into sounds of a now-lost era. The result is a timeless work, a bolt from the blue of blinding beauty.

Eight years later Karin tries again with Plunge, and those who loved The Knife's “Shaking the Habitual” will appreciate a surprising convergence toward those forms of surrealist, queer-flavoured feminism that genuinely only seem to exist in Stockholm, Berlin and a handful of exclusive English and American colleges still devoted to the totalitarian cult of post-structuralism and Cultural Studies. To get into the spirit of Fever Ray's new work, it helps to read the lyrics. In “This Country”, for instance, Dreijer sings “Free abortions/And clean water” and “Every time we fuck we win/This house makes it hard to fuck/This country makes it hard to fuck!”. In the manifesto accompanying the record, titled “Listen!” and written in collaboration with artist Hannah Black, we find lines in the same vein: “Sex is work, love is work, work is sex, work is love, the magical conversion of ‘is' given impossible power by its delivery in music.” (…) “I'm looking for a girl who stands 10 feet tall and has teeth like razors… I'm looking for a girl to affirm my reality, or cancel it.” They almost read like ravings penned by Valerie Solanas, but transposed into the age of social-media activism and TV series like American Horror Story. It's precisely a dark, weird-horror aesthetic, postmodern and glossily hi-def (a bit like what we see in the latest seasons of AHS) that we find both in the album's teaser trailer and in the video for “To the Moon and Back”, where the artist sings lines like “I want to run my fingers up your pussy!” while being force-fed food and subjected to a rather delicate masked pissing session.

As should be clear by now, the Fever Ray project, resurrected after eight years, turns out to be a far cry from its debut, even if there's a faint echo of the past in the track “Mustn't Hurry”. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, provided fans of the old Fever Ray are willing to accept a new direction that flirts with “accelerationist” hi-tech sounds somewhat reminiscent of certain Janus releases, like some work by the blonde Swedish amazon Kablam (the sewing circle, evidently, is always the same one), but transposed into an (avant-)pop key. A telling example of this shift is the track “IDK About You”, which seems to look with interest toward things like Not Waving and the recent output of Powell's Diagonal label, always attuned to the fast-moving, evanescent shifts in youth trends. It should also be added that, on one hand, the close engagement with burning sexual themes elevates the whole project in a certain sense, while on the other hand one can't help but reckon with a somewhat forced revisiting of Knife-style moves, particularly those of their self-titled debut. The lead single “To The Moon And Back”, with its catchy refrain and its slinking electro pulse, only confirms this suspicion, notwithstanding a potential mainstream step forward on the horizon.

Things get more intense and moving, though, with the wonderful, deeply sad ballad “Red Trail”, complete with Middle Eastern strings and a leaden, carpet-like climax. Things then fade again with the syncopated, android pulse of the following “An Itch”, in which friend Janine Roston, aka Planningtorock, and the forgotten Sir Alice seem to be reflected in the very same spot. All told, Plunge alternates irreverent gestures and well-articulated writing centred on contemporary themes with sonic blends whose effect is at times all too predictable. It's a mix that in some ways hits home and seduces, but in other, no less important ways tends to indulge in one too many repetitions.

The long tail of those songs stretched two years further, leading to the release of Plunge Remix, a sumptuous collection that expands the already multifaceted stylistic range on display in the original versions. Ten remixes on the vinyl edition, eighteen on the CD, a full 21 on the digital release: the result of work by 18 DJs/producers, among whom one finds Bjork (on the obsessive reworking of “This Country Makes It Hard TO Fuck”), Paula Temple (working on two explosive revisions of the same track) and Karin's brother, Olof Dreijer — the other half of the Knife — on “Wanna Slip”. On average the remixes stay fairly close to the author's original writing, leaving ample room for both the vocal parts and the tribal atmosphere, although in some cases more urban passages come to the fore (as with Bunny Michael on “IDK About You”), chopped up, or driven by a hard-hitting four-on-the-floor kick, as in the two new reissues of “I'm Not Done”, the only track drawn from the 2009 self-titled solo debut, remixed for the occasion by Fever Ray herself.

As always happens in these cases, new opportunities emerge for the reshaped tracks, the most widely covered being “Mustn't Hurry” (a full five versions) and “To The Moon And Back” (four). The queer message of the Swedish musician's compositions remains unchanged, just as its ancestral roots come through undiminished. The sensual component, however, gains fresh vigour, in further amped-up versions, perfect for programming in the world's best clubs, especially those willing to strike a more “avant” stance.

*Contributions by Alberto Asquini (Fever Ray), Giuliano Delli Paoli (Shaking The Habitual, Plunge), Marco De Baptistis (Plunge), Claudio Lancia (“Plunge Remix”)

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