A cracked smile and a silent POLL - The Knife and Fever Ray Albums Poll

Voted Tomorrow in a Year just to give it a fighting chance, but they were really on fire for those few years between Silent Shout and Tomorrow in a Year and I could vote for any of it, including the live album and OAR003.

It's a tough one.

Silent Shout was my intro to The Knife, but I discovered 'Heartbeats' at exactly the same time and I sometimes forget it's not on the same album.
'The Captain' blew me away so much when I first heard it, and still does. Something Shakespearean about it - something like The Tempest or Macbeth. That's the tune which sold me and made me a fan.
I love how ghoulish they sound on SS. The lupine 'HOW! HOW! HOW! HOW! / WHO! WHO! WHO WHO!' parts on One Hit, for example. I'm less of a fan of the middle part, including the singles.

Shaking The Habitual though, that felt revolutionary to me. I had started a band and had seriously started thinking about the music-making process. Not just the process of composing, but the process of coming-up with ideas. I was also in a big Wire-subscribing 'break out the box' fuck conventions mode and the whole thing just clicked into place and shattered my worldview. Not just that, but social politics and soical media were having a big impact on my world. I was commuting to work at The Guardian as a salesperson at the time and there was a trans protest outside the building one night about an article they'd written. Being a smalltown boy, it had literally never occurred to me that trans people were anything more than a sort of sitcom staple. It's not a long time ago, but it had a serious impact on the way I think about the world and society and people. STH conflated everything: music composition, experimental art and intersectionality. I don't listen to it so much these days. Like boxedjoy said, it's an arresting listen, but not an every day listen. It remains a really important album in my life.

good post Dog Latin, this is why i feel like Shaking The Habitual needs more love, it's just such a monumental album. i have only played Tomorrow, In a Year one time, not sure why, but need to rectify that.

Silent Shout and Fever Ray are undoubtedly excellent albums, but Shaking the Habitual feels the most urgent and vital, so that's the one I voted for.

I could flip a coin on SS, STH and FR, today it lands on Fever Ray.

i'm in America ans witnessing our country ripping itself apart, so i took a walk:

"And that's when it hurts
When you see the difference
It's a raging lung
And a difference
What a difference
A little difference would make"

That is such a great song

Does 'raging lung' mean anything or did they just think it sounded cool?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

They're about to launch a livestream to celebrate their 20th anniversary. All their videos then their Coachella performance and then a DJ set from Olof Dreijer.

https://youtu.be/wkUyp1oWbAA

http://static.skaip.org/img/emoticons/180x180/f6fcff/headphones.gif

Olof looks like he could have been a toddler 20 years ago.

He is just taunting us with those background images of beach scenes dancing and discos, though.

The whole thing made me really, really wish that I'd got to see The Knife on the Shaking The Habitual tour. (I only saw them performing Tomorrow In A Year, which was... something really different.) So many of my friends went to see them, and half of them were all "IDGI who is playing what." and the other half acted like they'd had some religious experience where band and audience had merged and everyone had become one orgiastic dancing mass - and now I kinda see what they mean?

I got to see Fever Ray touring the first album and it was the best show I've seen that involved the least effort on the part of the performer - iirc Karin mainly (maybe exclusively) stood still in a freaky animal getup and let the light show and backing track do the heavy lifting. wonderful

Olof was excellent there and those visual effects were the right side of trippy for a quarantine disco

oh boy, oh boy, oh boy

going to tune in now.

Weird. Have drunkenly/randomly ended up playing "Live at Terminal 5" tonight. I think it was partly suggested by a friend watching "Handmaid's Tale" and messaging me about a (non-Knife) track and my brain taking it from there.

Rex The Dog is streaming a live synth Knife tribute special on twitch - deconstructing his Heartbeats remix rn

They never made a better album than Silent Shout, but every time I listen to Shaking the Habitual I appreciate it more. It kinda reminds me of Laurie Anderson's United States Live in scope (though USL is 2 records/like 40 songs longer). I'm not throwing either on very frequently because they're both demanding, ambitious listens, but they reward you for putting in the work.

Having said that, the apex of the Knife's career is/was/will always be the live version of "Heartbeats"