Music

The Knife - Silent Shout review

Enigmatic Swedish siblings Karin and Olof Dreijer follow up 2003's Deep Cuts LP (which featured the track Heartbeats, recently covered by Jose Gonzalez) with this gleefully peculiar and playful third album. In general terms, their territory is best pigeonholed as offbeat vocal electro - not quite accessible enough to fit the electropop label and just shy of the campy pretentiousness of electroclash.

The album opens with lead single Silent Shout, a deceptively restrained blend of hypnotic synth pulses and sparse percussion with layered vocals veiled behind a murky vocoder. It's a soothing, vaguely spooky but thoroughly head-noddable intro. From here on in, though, the duo's agenda is most definitely not to soothe but to unnerve and experiment, largely through the extreme post-production treatment of vocals - multi-layered, abrasive, octave-shifted, pitch-bent and often eerily reverberated, depending on your perspective they either trample all over the instrumentation like a parade of squealing elephants or add a brilliantly unusual flavour to the album. Personally, we haven't yet made up our minds - moments like One Hit are nothing but a mess, whilst the very wonky and slightly shrill We Share Our Mother's Health is as curious as it is enjoyable.

If you've an appetite for the unusual - especially when it comes to vocals - then this should tickle your fancy. If, on the other hand, you think Björk is "a bit too out there" and like your electro clean and dour, leave this one on the shelf.

Rating:
Released: 27th March 2006
Label: Rabid

30-01-2007