The Knife
Silent Shout
[Rabid; 2006]
One of the prevailing critical talking points surrounding the release of Radiohead's Kid A had to do with Thom Yorke's willful defilement of his own vocals. Remember the reactions? Those desperate for the band to remain in the golden-throated glory days of The Bends puzzled over the move before ultimately chalking it up to a function of Yorke's inscrutable eccentricity; others cited interviews in which Yorke professed to be sick of his own voice as proof there was a more sympathetic method to his madness. But despite all the peripheral talk about the band's blossoming love of electronic and experimental music, few critics advanced the simplest theory, which was that Radiohead had completely succumbed to its own lust for the textures of dance music. No wonder those vocals had to go.
Vocal-fronted acts in dance and electronic music have tangled for years with how to rectify the textural freshness afforded by synths, samplers, and computers with the relative milque-toastiness of the human voice. The disco/house solution has been to lubricate vocals with a glossy coating of filters and vocoders; electro's has been to marry cold, bristly analogs with deadpan vocal affect; IDM's has been to chop, slice, and dice; and a number of general purpose dance acts have decided that multiplicity (by way of an endless procession of guest vocalists) is the key to staying energized. That said, only a handful of electronic full-lengths have navigated the vocal/textural divide as inventively as and refreshingly as Kid A. The latest is Silent Shout.
The brainchild of Swedish siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson, the Knife have released three records, each an exponential improvement over the last. Although the last, 2004's Deep Cuts, boasted the shimmering "Heartbeats"-- a sort of "99 Luftballons" for the techno set, since covered by up-and-coming indie darling José Gonzalez-- it was also something of a mess, spitting up steel drum samples, happy hardcore breaks, and innocuous synthpop riffs. A much tighter, laser-guided record, Silent Shout finds the duo honing in on a specific mood, and at last, perfecting a signature sound. As evidenced by the Chris Cunningham-esque creature adorning the promotional material and artwork of the album's debut single, the operative adjective here is "evil." Along with recent outings from Mu and Cristian Vogel, Silent Shout achieves a forbidding cold-bloodedness by melding contemporary electronic sounds with a grotesque vocal palette. Call it "haunted house."
As menacing as it is hooky, this is some bracing stuff. It helps that Dreijer's arrangements have become more assured and refined over time-- from the rushing percussion and synth flares of "Neverland" to the hall of plexiglass mirrors wonkiness of "We Share Our Mother's Health", he frequently finds a striking balance between minimalism and dissonance. But, as alluded above, Andersson's vocals do the bulk of the work. With "Heartbeats"-- not to mention her guest spot on Röyksopp's slept-on "What Else Is There"-- she proved that her shrill voice (think Björk by way of Ari Up by way of Siouxsie Sioux by way of Mu's Mutsumi Kanamori) was capable of magic in its natural form, but little of Silent Shout grants us that pleasure.
Here, her vocals are almost always multi-tracked, with at least one of those tracks run through a pitch shifter or octave filter or something similar, usually to genuinely creepy result. On the record's eponymous horrorshow opener, she sounds like she's duetting with Zuul; "The Captain" runs her vocal through an exciter and pitch-shifts it up to mimic the Oriental scale; "Still Light" has her singing feebly into a ceiling fan from a hospital bed; and "One Hit" is possibly the only song in the world that could be reasonably classed "goblin glam" (note: that means it's great). An early contender for best record of the quarter, here's hoping Silent Shout inspires similar imagination and pushing outwards; after all, no matter how heady and interior electronic music allows itself to become, it could never get as scary as the world outside.
Posted to Pitchfork by Mark Pytlik on February 13, 2006.