The Knife
Shaking The Habitual [Rabid Records]
“I do not like the idea of concept,” Karin Dreijer once told me in the most insightful interview I’ve had the privilege of conducting, circa the release of her Fever Ray LP. “As soon you get close to a too defined idea, then you have to work towards it in some way.” Four years later, that quote couldn’t be more pertinent.
Shaking the Habitual finds Dreijer’s deranged cast of pitch-shifted characters at their most strident. The birth screams that mark A Tooth For An Eye, those punked-up anti-Liberal declamations of Full of Fire (not to mention the unsexed “let’s talk about gender, bay-bee” squelches that could only be described as emanating from a person that the new gender-neutral pronoun the Swedes have introduced defines) remain anchored in her past timbres enough to pick her out of a line-up, but carry a sense of rage hitherto unknown – a feat considering it’s the same vocal cords that once cried “I couldn’t help it; hitting her came instinctively”.
Much discourse around Shaking has been concerned with its politics, its pyrrhic attack on systemic and structural violence – as if the Knife haven’t always been socially conscious in their messages – but the real terror here is personal in the deepest sense. It is an attack on the very self, a scalpel sunk deep into the superego in an attempt to remove a malignant cancer playing benign; the cancer of a received consciousness so complex, you can’t figure out where you start and it ends.
One might argue that anti-ideology is ideology in and of itself, but here, musically, narratively, the Knife use the tools of distortion and confusion to disrupt our embeddedness in a symbolic order, showing up the illusory nature of ‘reality’. It’s in the lopsidedness of track lengths, the dizzy rhythmic shifts and disjointedness, the animalistic thrust of its beats and the unexplainable anxiety this whole record showers down on you. And yet, beneath all this, there is still an indefinable structure – a bent, broken form, dragged back into the primordial. -Daniel Gray
Pharmakon
Abandon [Sacred Bones]
Noise music tends to fall into two camps; that which sublimates emotion and that raises human emotion to a senseless, terrifying intensity. Pharmakon’s music is definitely in the latter category. Margaret Chardiet’s voice is central, a raging, blackened screech that threatens to tear the vocal cords from her throat. Around it hang dank, harsh tones and pulsating rhythms, always confrontational and sinister yet hypnotic and alluring at the same time. A striking, powerful and hauntingly atmospheric work. -Ian Maleney
Majical Cloudz
Impersonation [4AD]
One way to avoid genre pigeon-holing to is to strip back your sound until there is almost nothing left. Majical Cloudz have whittled the pop song down to its barest possible form, with little left but one keyboard and a voice that is impossible to ignore. When Childhood Ends is the single and it is a beautiful, dark tale of lost innocence, Devon Welsh sounding dramatic and impassioned, cleat yet always on the verge of sinking into the rolling keyboard tones beneath. A stark and minimal statement of cathartic intent. – Ian Maleney
https://soundcloud.com/majical-cloudz/childhoods-end
Phoenix
Bankrupt!
[V2 Records]
Bankrupt! follows many of the traits of breakthrough Wolfgang Amadeus though shorn of universally enjoyed power-pop belters like Lisztomania and 1901. Even the title track here fills the roll of Love Like A Sunset, an excursion into vaguely post-rock territory, wordless until a late appearance from Thomas Mars. Unusually however it is this meandering threshing of synths and harpsichord arpeggios that actually kicks off this album, unveiling a thoroughly delectable second side very much worth sticking around for. – Ian Lamont
Gravetemple
Ambient/Ruin [Ideologic Organ]
Drone, field recordings and black metal combine on this second album proper from the outer-metal supergroup. Stephen O’Malley’s droning guitar work and Oren Ambarchi’s feel for tone will be familiar to many but the theatrical vocals of Attila Chisar – the Hungarian vocalist who led Mayhem after Dead, well, died – steal what’s left of the limelight, adding a strangely warped human element to the mix. Over four lengthy tracks, the general outlook is bleak as hell but the odd shaft of light manages to break through to these dungeons of gloom. – Ian Maleney
