The Knife has done away with the need to ever take an acid trip because they have neatly presented 13 songs which takes you on some very weird, psychedelic trip you won’t forget.
One of my all-time favourite songs is the Knife’s ‘Heartbeats’, full of electro pop goodness. Unfortunately, Shaking the Habitual is nothing like ‘Heartbeats’. Strip away the sweet and melodic sensibilities of the song, throw in a massive amount of dark, twisted metal and you won’t even be close to what’s on Shaking the Habitual.
With the Knife’s last album released in 2006, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the band’s sound has evolved. The album opens with ‘A Tooth for an Eye’, a little bit tribal and a little bit Carribean. The song evokes images of semi-naked tribes people dancing around a big bonfire, waving their hands in the air and chanting for some god-like creature to save them. With lyrics like “Another kid needs to suck on my thumb”, I wonder what drugs The Knife was on when the duo wrote the piece.
‘A Cherry on Top’ sees The Knife venture into some atmospheric instrumentation. Words like dark, technologic and futuristic spring to mind. Halfway through it segues into something altogether haunting, with the siren-like ring in the background and click clacking of noises. It’s the kind of music you’d probably hear in your head if you were locked in solitary confinement in a mental asylum.
On songs like ‘Stay out here’, an 11 minute epic with a repetitive drum and bass beat, chills go up and down your spine with the creepy whispered vocals at the start of the song. Then there’s ‘Fracking Fluid Injection’, which is just a mash of noises and the spaced out sound effects The Knife love using on this album. I cannot express enough how weird and esoteric this album is, especially on songs like this.
This truly is one of the strangest ‘albums’ I’ve ever heard. I use the word album loosely because it’s more like a collection of noises. It’s full of jagged beats and no real melody or anything catchy at all to latch onto. Instead, it’s full of dark and foreboding atmosphere and you can easily imagine a movie like The Machinist playing inside your head. This isn’t an easy album to listen to and the dark psychopathic atmosphere is just a little too disturbing for my liking.
2/10
Reviewer: Stephanie McDonald