- It says a lot about The Knife's collaborative MO that midway through the Shaking The Habitual tour, they scrapped it and started over. Last winter, their troupe of dancers took time out to learn how to sing and play new versions of the group's songs. As Karin Dreijer told Dazed: "We wanted to make a dance show so the music had to be dancier."
The result is a set of tracks that, compared to the prickly, experimental music of Shaking The Habitual, are purposeful, propulsive and emotionally direct. They've lost none of their political edge, but they now have a raw, visceral physicality, a sense of glorious, almost carnivalesque release. "Bird" hurtles along, its pitch-bent synth and vocal lines barely tracking its tribal percussion. A ramped-up "Stay Out Here" gains a booming, warehouse techno kick and thins out its tangled mid-range, while also foregrounding its references to the euro and historian Eric Hobsbawm's concept of the "short" 20th century. Less intellectually, "Pass This On," a duet with Shannon Funchess, sounds like a potential Ibiza anthem—a gritty and poignant slice of vocal house.
If this, as The Knife have said, is their final release, then it is a crucial postscript. It humanises them, makes explicit their debt to club music and reasserts that a full dance floor can still resonate with ideas of solidarity and cultural resistance.
トラックリスト01. We Share Our Mothers' Health (Shaken Up Version)
02. Got 2 Let U (Shaken Up Version)
03. Bird (Shaken Up Version)
04. Without You My Life Would Be Boring (Shaken Up Version)
05. Pass This On feat. Shannon Funchess (Shaken Up Version)
06. Ready To Lose (Shaken Up Version)
07. The Knife, Shannon Funchess & Emily Roysdon - Stay Out Here (Shaken Up Version)
08. Silent Shout (Shaken Up Version)