The Knife

Rabid/EMI

Cold, calculated and downright scary – not words you would associate with at least half of the Knife’s 2003 debut album Deep Cuts. In addition to the sublime electro-pop offered by the likes of ‘Heartbeats’ (you know it; stop and think ‘Sony’, ‘Jose Gonzalez’, ‘bouncing balls’), ‘Girl’s Night Out’ and ‘You Take My Breath Away’ were novelty songs like ‘Hangin’ Out’ with the hilariously cringe-worthy lines:

‘I keep my dick hangin’ out of my pants,

So I can point out what I like.’

Back then we forgave the Swedish siblings – Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson –these missteps for the pure joy their camp, stupid, lost-in-translation music generated. Looking back, though, these moments may have held the album back from being the true classic its slew of singles hinted towards. Silent Shout then totally rewrites the template: gone the laughter and happiness, gone the novelty; cometh the darkness. Needless to say the Knife now has their (ahem) cutting-edge classic.

The title-track opens the proceedings like blood throbbing through a glacier. Not cold-hearted as such, just struggling to decide whether to be human or machine. Karin Dreijer’s vocals are immediately spooky; multi-tracked and manipulated to mechanical extremes. Ensuing tracks like ‘Neverland’ and ‘Like a Pen’ come on like house music with a face, and a hideous yet beautiful voice. When it comes to conforming to the genre’s boundaries though, lets just say the Knife are burning down the house. Vocals veer from the absurd to the polished turd – and surprisingly it’s all the better for it. The arrangements uniformly strike a balance between simplicity and raging dissonance; frighteningly inhumane but humanly aware of it.

While ‘Silent Shout’ confesses that ‘I never knew this could happen to me, I now know fragility’, one can’t help but feel that over the following hour or so this is just a hollow refrain. The album is almost destitute of true human emotion; leaving the power to emote to the listener. Sure, a song like ‘Marble House’ deals with a common tale of lost and/or reconciled love but it is executed in such a straight-faced Ladytron die-if-you-smile manner that the subject is void.

The finest moments (and we’re talking the best of the best) are when you are kept blissfully unaware of just what Dreijer is singing about. ‘We Share Our Mother’s Health’ takes the sound of a children’s carousel and douses it in beats and bleeps; a spooky subversive sound. Lyrics about coming down from the north and apple trees only aid what could well be a pumping club track. The beats return three tracks later on ‘Like a Pen’, as do some strangely sexual lyrics. On and on the Knife toe the line between human and machine, both musically and lyrically. Unrelentingly the heart throbs but struggles to be heard. Hey, maybe there really is some emotional depth to the title Silent Shout.

Carl Dixon