Like a terrible, blood drenched disco ball ascending from the stygian bowls of the earth, The Knife have finally returned to us.
It’s been a minute (or, more specifically, over 3 million) since they last rocked both the social consciousness and booties alike with their unnerving 2006 IDM masterpiece, Silent Shout. The volcanic hype built around follow-up Shaking the Habitual shouldn’t really surprise, then—finally, we have another album from the group who have been prophesied since times forgotten to suture up the ever-widening gap between “intelligent” dance music (which grows more alienating by the day) and the ever-expanding pop-sphere (which is just as charmingly vapid as ever). So does Shaking the Habitual do what the ancient texts of Pitchfork ’06 predicted and liberate us from the shackles of unjust musical inadequacy? Well, yes and no.
The issue here isn’t The Knife are no longer the absolute best at what they do. Quite the contrary. Even if their latest lacks the pure saccharine delights of such sugary numbers as “We Share Our Mother’s Health” (a charming tune about the inevitability of death and the hopelessness of fighting against your inherited imperfections), there’s still some brilliant pop dementia on display.
The first single “Full of Fire,” complete with its infectious chanting and constantly mutating percussion and synth work, is wormy and fascinatingly bizarre. “Without You My Life Would be Boring,” despite its surreal lyrics and urological fascination, is likely the closest the album comes to pop-perfection, its title delivered as a show-stopping hook in between undulations of hypnotic orientalist percussion. Even “Raging Lung,” with its ambient five-minute outro, boasts a catchy, chirping synth line that snakes through the front half of the song.
Thematically, Shaking the Habitual is pretty airtight as well. The album functions as a work of high-concept art, a frequently violent meditation on the likewise violent subject of male/female gender roles and their mercurial overlap.
Promotional art for the album featured sibling duo of vocalist Karin Dreijer Andersson and producer Olof Dreijer standing out in a field, with Dreijer dressed in drag. “Full of Fire”’s video features an elderly woman cross dressing and pissing in the street in a meditated deconstruction of preordained femininity (among, you know, other things) while Andersson howls, “Of all the guys and the signori/Who will write my story?” in a fit of revisionist, third-wave-feministic rage. The second single “A Tooth for an Eye”’s music video features a woman leading a herd of hunky men in a dance routine, clearly functioning as the figure of power in the room. The Knife claimed this was their “punk” album, and here, in their aggressive dismissal of socially orchestrated divides, that becomes most apparent.
Despite the thematic drive, though, the album is undermined by a pervasive sense of bloated aimlessness. When Shaking the Habitual was first announced, with its 13 tracks and 90-minute runtime (for the lazy out there, an average of seven minutes per track), I was absolutely salivating, especially after the manic “Full of Fire” dropped and absolutely justified its nearly 10-minute length. When I found out that only five of the 13 tracks were around or under five minutes long, I absolutely lost it.
But the duo, shockingly, failed to live up to expectations. The 20-minute centerpiece “Old Dreams Waiting to be Realized” isn’t the giant groundbreaking deconstructive revelation it could’ve been—instead it winds up sounding like a poorly sketched bedroom drone blueprint, 20 minutes of dull repetitions and minimalist experimentations. It breaks up the flow of the album, which actually benefits heavily from its removal. The other giant experimental centerpiece, “Fracking Fluid Injection,” an improvised rallying call against its titular practice, likewise fails to impress with its overly-long amateur avant-garde-isms. The other instrumental tracks (the aggressive and mercifully short “Crake” and “Oryx” and the meatier, dancier “Networking”) either serve as short-but-startling intermissions or impressive testaments to Dreijer’s nightmarish production skills, but they can’t undo the damage. When roughly one third of your album’s length is eaten up by two monstrous (and monstrously dull) tracks it’s hard to forgive, even if the other two-thirds are verging on perfection.
An appropriate comparison would be Swans’ latest, The Seer, an even longer album featuring even longer (mostly) instrumental grinds. And I’ll say the same thing about Shaking the Habitual that I did about The Seer when it first dropped: It’s an overly indulgent work of unprecedented, egomaniacal genius that will likely be one of the best, if not the most “important,” album of the year—but I’ll be damned if I listen to all the way throu ever again.
Grade: B+
