Customer Reviews

Silent Shout

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Knife slips its blade in slowly in this, their third and eeriest ablum to date. Their sound has never been so insidious and effective.

Most of the songs loom large and unapologetic on a static-heavy foundation of pure electronica. The Knife experiments with some serious, in-your-face sound changes, most of them involving bizarre vocal arrangements (that sound melted, tweaked, and tweezered) and massive chunks of computerized noise.

When they're not infiltrating the nerves with schizophrenic, hyper-active machinery ("We Share Our Mother's Health" and "Like A Pen"), they're lulling listeners into dim groves of lyrical whispers ("Forest Families" and "One Hit"). This is the kind of album that's so avant-garde, so experimental, so hard to define and yet so insistently familiar that the urge to compare it to other records of its kind is almost unresistible.

But, in all honesty, there really is no other record to compare it to. The techno-militant urgency of "Neverland," the winding orchestral phantasms of "Marble House," the star-lit brilliance of the title track -- they may play like the distant cousins of Bjork, Massive Attack, Aphex Twin, or the Sneaker Pimps, but they are still indelibly unique. Fans of electronic music will be more than pleased, and everyone else may just find a few reasons to give the genre a more serious look.

Were you ever curious what it would sound like if David Lynch decided to make an electropop album? Well, Silent Shout may be your answer. This is probably the oddest album since Bjork's "Medulla" (yet this is much more successful in my opinion). Even darker and weirder than their last album, "Silent Shout" is also a huge leap forward. "Deep Cuts" had all the ingredients to be an album I should love, but for some reason it never completely drew me in. I definitely LIKED it, but there were a few too many ideas and it just didn't seem to reach its full potential. "Silent Shout," on the other hand, drew me in instantly. It is very cohesive, it builds on all the band's strengths, and it sets them apart from pretty much any other band in existence. It's dark and creepy and otherwordly, yet at the same time there's a surreal warmth and beauty that radiates from the music. It's a mood unlike any other I've experienced before from any other artist. That's why this album draws you in and warrants repeated listenings. Music that is immediately catchy and accessible can be quite nice (like an old acquaintance), but it's these bands that reinvent music and bring something fresh to the table (like a new lover) that keep you coming back for more, and should really be recognized as something special.

Take Bjork's vocals, distort them many different ways, layer them on top of each other until you have what sounds like a choir of aliens or strange forest creatures, then add them to brooding pads, arpeggiated synths, and electronic drum beats, and you have an idea of what this album sounds like (the result is so much better than it may look in writing, though). The music isn't just a novelty either. It really is good from beginning to end. Some of my favorite tracks so far are "The Captain," "We Share Our Mothers' Health," "Like a Pen," and "Forest Families." My least favorite is "Neverland." It's ok, but I find it a little more jarring than the rest of the album. Just a slight misstep in an otherwise perfect work of art.

Check out the videos from the album, too. They really complement the mood - especially the video for the title track, which has a very creepy David Lynch feel. I watched it before my first listen of the album and it really helped set the tone.

I highly recommend this album to fans of electro, darker-toned pop, or any brave music fan. It may seem overwhelmingly odd at first, but if you give it a chance, you may be greatly rewarded. Brilliant.

I first heard this album on vinyl the other week when I was looking for some new mixing material. I didn't buy it then, because I new this was one of those electro albums I would love listening to and not mixing. Not to say there aren't good tracks for mixing. More then half the album would be great for mixing. This album just has something else that most dancefloor friendly electro albums don't.
There are great melodies and atmospheres created throughout the album. Then theres the vocals. I must say the female vocalist of "The Knife" has one of the most interesting and seductive voices I've heard in any genre of music. Her voice demands your attention. Electro songs without vocals lack a certain connection with the listener. And a lot of vocals in elecro songs
are just monotone and sleazy. Some are good. But some can just sound lame and annoying. Her voice is the best I've heard in dance music. I'm not going to go into what each song sounds like and what they're about, cause I don't think my writing could do them justice. If you want to hear the album go there website, "the Knife". You can hear influences of Kraftwerk
and others in there music, but there sound is quite unique and really draws you in. No complaints. I love it.

After cheesy pop "Deep Cuts" (that featured the hit "Heartbeats") I could never expect this from The Knife, this album is so different, so weird in a good way and Karin Dreijer Andersson?s voice is very thrilling, most of the times it?s doubled with octavesup and make their sound even odder...standouts are "captain", which starts like an average new age song and finishes with a beautiful chinese melody and "marble house" which will probably be their next single. Try to listen Royksopp?s "what else is there" featuring Karin...This is ABBA on acid. Brilliant!!

Silent Shout deserves to be in the company of such groundbreaking electronic albums as #1 by Fischerspooner and Mezzanine by Massive Attack. Simply put, this is an amazing album from beginning to end. I will admit that I wasn't so enthralled with it on the first, second, or even third listen, but right now I'm absolutely loving it. If you're like me and you didn't get it on the first listen, give it some time and I promise you won't be disappointed. It's a shame that this album will stay largely under the radar. The masses don't know what they're missing.

Best known for their beautifully tender Heartbeats (touchingly covered by Jose Gonzalez and used during Sony's Bravia television campaign featuring thousands of super balls filmed bouncing down a Chicago street), Swedish brother and sister duo The Knife have followed up on the vibrant electro styles of 2005's Deep Cuts with an album far more sinister and shadowy. Keeping with their surreal style, Karin and Olof Dreijer began recording Silent Shout in an abandoned carbon dioxide factory before relocating to the underground catacombs of an ancient Stockholm church. Karin's squeaky yet heartbreaking vocals have been thoroughly manipulated on Silent Shout, with the Scandinavian pop overtones of Deep Cuts being replaced by a much darker vibe. The glacial synthesizers of The Captain are as sharp as the band's name suggest, while the frenetic We Share Our Mother's Health - complete with Teutonic vocals announcing `We come down from the north' - sounds like an electro take on Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song. Although the filtered effects and overwhelming darkness of many of the songs make it frequently opaque, Silent Shout's highlight Marble House lightens the mood a little. Featuring Swedish musician Jay Jay Johanson as a guest singer, this future single finds his tender vocals offsetting Karin's creepy sounds. The exciting Madonna-versus-Royksopp style of Marble House, the delicate From Off To On and the skittery beats of the opening title track mean that although Silent Shout has less commercial zest, its enlightened and progressive nature has the power to both confound and delight.

Silent Shout is the third album of Swedish electronic duo The Knife, composed of brothers Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson. The album takes on a very sinister feel, between Andersson's distorted vocals that often sound like something taken straight out of The Exorcist and the continual resonant high pitches that run throughout the album that are occasionally goosebump inducing. The Knife manages to walk the fine line between dissonance and harmony, with sounds that are occasionally so off-pitch that they are almost painful to hear. Indeed, the use of harsh sounds makes the Knife unlikely to ever break into the mainstream, despite being tightly wound into pulsing beats.

True to their namesake, the most outstanding aspect of the album is the knife-like concision of the beats created with percussions and synthesizers. The percussions run choppily album in pulsing, concise beats, which are often used to great effect. For example, the title track "Silent Shout" begins and ends with a prominent drum beat that is reminiscent of a heartbeat before the shrill synthesizer beats come in, which adds to the creepy, dark aspect of the album. The variance in the percussion is also impressive, such as the range from a bizarre rattling sound in "Marble House" to an almost tropical Caribbean drum beat in the same song. The synthesizer is also often used to create a textured layer to the beats, coming in sharp pulses of high-pitched sound the oddly complement the more full-bodied sound of the percussions.

At the same time, the synthesizer is also used to heighten the mood of the album with looming melodies. The synthesizer almost seems to moan intermittently through the songs in and out of the sharper beats, such as in the beginning of "Forest Families." The vocals lend a similar effect to the songs. The heavy distortion of the female vocals can make them sound shrill and drawn out over the course of the same song. On "Silent Shout" the vocals almost sound like they are layered on top of one another to create an almost demonic effect, and in many other tracks the female voice is significantly pitch shifted. Although the vocals lend themselves particularly well to the haunting mood of the entire album, they tend to lean towards cacophony rather than harmony and are somewhat difficult to listen to. The female vocalist always sounds noticeably strained, almost to the point where the overall effect could be described as "constipated." Although the distorted vocals blend in seamlessly with the beat of the album, they sometimes seem to detract from the overall song, such as on "Still Light," which features the downshifted Exorcist sounds combined with screeching vocals.

Given the occasional abrasive qualities of the sounds used, perhaps the minimalist use of sound is what particularly suits the Knife. The album is peppered with masterful uses of silence that becomes part of the music. In fact, it makes some of the sounds used that much more shocking to the ear, and infuses the beats with much more life, making their sharp punches more pronounced.

While Silent Shout definitely carries a certain appeal with its seamless beats and commitment to the thematic creepiness, it is definitely not an album for everyone. However, after getting beyond the initial inaccessibility of the album one finds a deeply and darkly emotional album with rich musical textures woven throughout.

The first song on Silent Shout is a contender for the best dance single of the decade. It takes many cues from Underworld's 1993 classic Dubnobasswithmyheadman: the sparse production, the gradual build-up, and even the bass line recall "Dark And Long." The Knife's fascination with vocal distortion also owes a lot to Underworld. However, the song doesn't just recreate the basic sound of nineties techno, it also recreates the focus on original, catchy rhythms and vocal lines. The keyboard lead in "Silent Shout" is incredible. The rhythm is distinctive, very easy to remember, but quite complex, with a lot of variation in the basic pattern. I can't think of any band of the 2000s that managed to come up with an original musical phrase of this length -- the music of the 2000s tends to focus on extremely basic loops.

The title track also has subtle shifts in dynamics. Toward the end, the main keyboard line gains a louder and sharper sound, the individual notes start to blur together as if the music is about to fall apart into noise. But instead, there's a break, the turbulence quickly dies down, and ghostly echoes appear in the outro.

The album as a whole is a bit less brilliant, but still immensely enjoyable. The composition is firmly rooted in the song-oriented style of the early nineties, which brings out the originality of the songwriting. Karin Dreijer's vocal style was probably inspired by Bjork's (the same heavily-accented dissonance), but Bjork never thought to warp her own voice the way Dreijer does in "The Captain." She comes on suddenly, after a long, Autechre-like ambient intro; the distortion renders the lyrics unintelligible and makes her voice sound like the call of some shrill, wild bird. There is a certain triumphant, predatory tinge in the vocal rhythm. You'd think they were singing about war instead of sea captains.

In many songs, the lyrics appear to express some kind of oblique, vague feminism. "Neverland" is apparently about a high-end call girl who coldly regards her clients, "One Hit" appears to mock traditional ideas of gender roles, and "Forest Families" seems to be about how a young woman feels stifled growing up in a provincial town where adults "said my favourite book was dirty, and 'you should not show you can read.'" I say "seems" because most of the lyrics are indirect, and often suffer from Bjork syndrome, where awkward metaphors and grammatical mistakes are passed off as an original way of expression. For instance, "From Off To On" bothers me a bit, since it uses such an earnestly sentimental delivery (and a demonstratively childlike melody, which I'm pretty sure they lifted from some old Russian children's LP or other) to say such lines as, "we want happiness back, we want control of our bodies" (is that really such a problem in contemporary Sweden?), followed by, "I had a dream about deleting and killer whales." But that's just me; Bjork fans will be all over this.

What appeals to me more is the album's tight sense of the dramatic, something it shares with early Underworld. "Forest Families" is sort of a simpler version of "Silent Shout," with the same type of worried keyboard line. But, whatever one may think of the lyrics, when Dreijer intones, "music tonight / I just want your music tonight" in the chorus, that really captures the frustrated young person's desperation. "Marble House" has a swooning, colossal chorus. The verses and music aren't anything special, but when the distorted falsetto starts warbling the rhythm of the chorus, it's pure pop heaven. "Neverland" sounds as icy as its subject, and when Dreijer hoarsely repeats "the money burns in my hand," it creates a haunting sense that the protagonist is about to snap under the pressure.

There are only three songs where I don't care for the music: "We Share Our Mothers' Health," "Like A Pen" and "One Hit." All three songs are much less melodic than the rest of the album, and use a jagged analog drum-and-bass rhythm section similar to Aphex Twin's Chosen Lords. "One Hit" is the best of the three, since the lyrics are pretty funny, but none of them can boast anything in the way of melody. In my view, that's the only reason to give the album a less-than-perfect score.

Overall, though, this is without question one of the five or ten best albums of the decade. It's the first electronic album of the 2000s to really go back and relearn the lessons of the early nineties, but instead of merely imitating the classics, it uses them to emphasize new, creative musical ideas. In particular, the first three tracks are extremely strong, and make one feel like one is experiencing something completely new and unheard-of. If the entire album doesn't quite meet that standard, that's only because it's a really high standard.

This Swedish electropp dup is still pretty low-profile, though the Knife seem to be following in the footsteps of Broadcast -- eerie, atmospheric, pretty pop music. Third album "Silent Shout" returns to the band's root sounds, after the harder techno of their last album, and it's a breath of electronic fresh air.

It opens with the blippy, spacey beats of the title track, which shimmers all over the place over some heavy grounding beats. A chorus of voices murmur, like a choir of robots. It's a great intro, and it's a big contrast to the song that comes after it -- the ominous, stomping techno of "Neverland."

The rest of the album is an attempt to reconcile the two previous sounds the band has had -- hard techno, and airy electropop. After "Neverland," there are a couple straightforward techno songs that sound like a spacier Autechre, including the robotic "Like A Pen" and the schizophrenic space bleeps of "We Share Our Mothers' Health."

But the majority of these songs are softer and stranger. The Knife dips into spacey experimental music, tropical ambience with eerie yowls, shimmery electropop, ominous lullabies, and one song that sounds like a distress call from a spaceship, set to a soft electronic beat. It winds up with the undulating, whispery "Still Light," which is perhaps the creepiest song of all.

In "Silent Shout," the Knife strike a good balance between techno and experimental soundscapes, which was missing from their previous two albums -- both were good, but they had entirely different music. They've learned moderation, using the harder beats in a softer melody, and also creating dreamy soundscapes that may not get people dancing, but might transport them to another planet.

The harder beats don't even sound catchy -- they sound more like a sonic attack. Other synth gets twisted into kettle drums, pretty shimmers, and eerie sonic walls. Karin's voice is heavily filtered by computers, but this isn't done because it's a bad voice. Rather, it makes the pretty, fragile vocals fit in with the otherworldly music, as she lets out a series of Bjorkian yowls and murmurs.

The Knife would do a great job with the soundtrack to a sci-fi movie, since they already have the right sound -- chilly, eerie and beautiful.

While this is a very innovative album, I would offer caution to anyone diving in without knowing the content. The album is not listener friendly. It demands a familiarity of electronic music and especially IDM to appreciate some of the tunes these two put together. Some of the vocoder manipulations of the vocals can be disturbing. However, the music itself is very catchy and enjoyable. All it takes is a matter of getting past the arm that The Knife puts out to keep people from immersing themselves in this album. The uptempo beat tracks are the standouts. However, almost half the album wallows in downtempo stretches that can test the patience of the mainstream ear. Overall, the album is very well produced with interesting electronic arrangements. However, the album as a whole is not one that I connect with emotionally. Not that this music makes any attempt at human warmth.