Monday, May 05, 2014

[record review] The Knife "Shaking the Habitual" (2013)

I am a member of Frank's APA, an amateur press association for people who like music. I sometimes worry that my APA colleagues and I are maybe a bit too isolated in our own musical tastes, that we enjoy yapping away about our own stuff but do not really engage with what other people like. As a way of countering that, I decided that I would start buying an album every two months that had been written about in the APA and made to sound interesting. And I started with this record. I got the two CD version, which seems to differ from the more expensive one disc edition by the inclusion of a long track at the end of disc one. That long track is mostly silent and barely musical. If the two disc version was more expensive I would feel a bit ripped off. But it is not, so hey.

I am one of those people who has a theoretical fondness for the Knife but before acquiring this record had heard next to nothing by them. I have heard the Fever Ray record by Mrs The Knife, but I accept that that is a bit different. For one thing it seems a bit more dance-floor oriented, apart from the quiet ambient tracks.

OK, I will come clean, I have not really listened to this record enough to say anything detailed about it. I like it, certainly, but I think it needs closer listening over time to tease out its secrets. I am interested by the slight nods towards Whitey's idea of what music from the Global Southern sounds like. The record certainly has a looseness that I would not normally expect from electronic music.

Although there are tracks called 'Oryx' and 'Crake', there do not seem to be any songs that just laboriously recount the plot of Margaret Atwood SF novels.

Fever Ray

Shaking the Panda

An inuit panda production

No comments: