Friday, June 22, 2007


The Knife- Silent Shout

Well, my promise to review albums basically withered and died ever since I've been in a severe depression. And if you've ever been in that kind of situation, you know that you should always wrap your junk when having sex with emo girls! (The alternate joke was going to be about being in a ravine, but then again, who the hell wants to hear about ravines?) Regardless, I am going to make a concerted effort to update more, because frankly my dear, I don't give a damn (about doing anything truely productive!)

The Knife's first album "Deep Cuts," is much more chipper and groovy then this macabre mess. As a result, "Silent Shout" is definitely a contrasting album for The Knife (Who don't like to play live and hate the degradation of women within the music industry). "Silent Shout" is a throbbing synth sprinkling lunar eclipse and is an extremely atmospheric and moody journey considering it is mostly synthesizer accompanied by all manners of SNAKE CHARMING beats. The distorted electro-vocals push the songs along, sung in mostly broken English and I'm assuming a pitter patter of Swede here and there. The vocoded VOCALS are of such great effect that I'm sure if Neil Young could go back and redo Trans with whatever technology these guys use, he probably wouldn't do it, because I think the masters for Trans are buried somewhere in a vault in the heart of the Atlantic Ocean. Trans gets a really bad rap though, considering that I'm sure it's even possible that THE KNIFE might have been influenced by it! So uh, God save the Trans and all that.

The title track, Finding Neverland and One Hit are probably my favorite tracks. They have the most interesting beats (A lot of it reminds me of Idioteque by Radiohead, really, I enjoy schizophrenic techno-wankery!) as well as One Hit having the MALE (Olaf is his Odin-given name, I believe) doing some sort of extremel;y perverse, satanic Cookie Monster vocals. But don't think Cookie Monster in terms of bad death metal, think in terms of TIMBRE and its BASS-LIKE qualities. Every song on this album has an enjoyable hook and its amazing how something that seems so experimental and avant-garde at times can be so damn catchy! (This is a common lament of most catchy, avant-garde music, it seems.) The sheer amount of sonic manipulation on this album, in terms of trying to figure out how the hell The Knife squeezes out so many great sounds out of the synthesizer for the leads of the songs and such will leave you astounded, and the overall bleak, ethereal quality of some of the tracks are quite entrancing. I hesitate to call it Dance-Eno, but for the love of David Byrne (!!!), it certainly seems to have a rather direct Eno influence (Well, that's pretty stupid, this is obvious to everyone.) Anyways, if anyone knows more about this band, feel free to comment, but otherwise, you should get this album. It "deigns to reign." The Knife are probably better then The Kinfe, the Genesis song, but I like both of them much like Mrs. Ramsey loved Jon Benet. I'd kill for either of them, mwa ha ha ha ha!

(Edit: If the formatting is really off, I'm sorry. Blogger is fucking ridiculous when it comes to trying to get stuff to appear properly.)

Rating: I like it more then Deep Cuts! I'm not sure what pitchfork has given this album, but I'll definitely give it a 9 out of 10 or something. Fractions are for sissy cop-out babies.

Download: Silent Shout- The Knife

8 comments:

Garret said...

Hey, I'm going away for a month. Update this a lot.

Undercooked Sausage said...

oh okay, i will. promise.

Joe said...

I gave up trying to figure out who was singing what on this a long time ago. I just know that I love it! I should probably go listen to Deep Cuts!

Joe said...

More like SILENT BLOG

Garret said...

Jesus Christ, fuck all of you.

Garret said...

I meant, both of you. Not Undo. Anyways.

Undercooked Sausage said...

Working a full-time job and having no hard drive space sucks. I haven't listened to an album in like a month.

my life is on indefinite hiatus until i go back to college.

Joe said...

I visited NIU the other day. I felt like a country boy in the big city for the first time.