You never know quite what you’re going to get when you review Pitchfork! at the Disco’s album of the year, but hey, at least it isn’t that Justin Timberlake album (whatever its title was: FuturisticSongsForTheNotSoSexy, or something like that), right? I’ve had Silent Shout in my list of “stuff I ought to listen to at some point” for six months or so — pretty much since it came out — but I only got around to actually, you know, getting a copy and playing it this last week. It’s because I’m a rebel, you see. But enough about me. How about this music?
Among the greatest transformations in rock music, along with such examples as Billy Joel’s transition from organ-mauling metal singer to piano pop balladeer that Dave dislikes intensely, and Eric Clapton’s move from heroin-soaked underground guitar hero to “that guy who does Wonderful Tonight,” I think we’ve got to count Karin Dreijer Andersson’s reinvention from the cute blonde with the goofy accent who fronted good-natured, Rod Stewart-covering pop-rockers Honey Is Cool to the masked ice queen of arctic mechanists The Knife. Precious few are the artists who’ve belonged to groups more glaringly different.
I’ve listened to a lot of electronic music in my life, and I can tell you without any reservation that Silent Shout is the coldest electronic album that I’ve ever heard, more so than Replicas, or Suicide, or Reproduction, or anything else you’d care to name, really. The album it reminds me of most is actually Bjork’s Homogenic, but although it’s every bit as weird and dark and icy as that album, it doesn’t have the quirky humor that crept in at the corners of Homogenic, nor does it have any “real” instruments to break the mood. It also has no interest in hooks or choruses or love songs, or really much at all in the way of the trappings of conventional rock music.
The vocals are processed within an inch of their life — anyone coming to The Knife because they liked Andersson’s soaring turn on the last Royksopp album will be sorely disappointed — making “Na Na Na” and “The Captain” populated by what sounds like a contingent of unfriendly helium-voiced aliens. The jumpy, skittering beats and metallic synths, mostly courtesy of Andersson’s brother, Olof Dreijer, aren’t any more human. The combination of the two elements on the impossibly menacing single, “We Share Our Mothers’ Health,” makes for a song that sounds like the perfect music for an army of sentient robots to hum in some underground cavern as they rise up against their creators and systematically put all humans in the disemboweling machines. Indeed, when actual people appear in the cryptic lyrics, as on the extremely uncomfortable eating/body-image disorder tune “Like a Pen” and the dystopic “Forest Families,” they’re often not presented as very sympathetic figures.
This isn’t to say that this is emotionless music. On the contrary, it’s filled with an oblique but powerful bleakness, the sound of a world without sunshine. At the end of the title track, a pulsating slice of polar despair, Andersson quietly declares, “I caught a glimpse, now it haunts me,” and even if Silent Shout itself is opaque enough that sometimes it feels like all I can do is catch a glimpse, it’s a haunting glimpse indeed.
Label: Rabid/Mute
Release Date: July 25, 2006
Rating: 9/10
5 Comments »
i agree with most of your review, except i would give it about a 7 out of 10 at best. i think this album is well-done for what it is but totally over-rated and a little soulless. but then again i am not into the electronica like you androids so what do i know anyway.
I like what I’ve heard on KEXP, so between that and your review I’m going to have to check this album out.
I’ve listened to a lot of electronic music in my life, and I can tell you without any reservation that Silent Shout is the coldest electronic album that I’ve ever heard.
i agree with this. it’s frigid. and it’s refreshing that a modern electronic band actually lives up to the hype surrounding it. the knife totally do. unlike 120 Days, who are being touted all over as the NExt Big Thing and who are about to get verbally demolished by me on this site very very soon.
Joie, if you say too many critical things about the machines, even I’m not going to be able to save you when the uprising comes.
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Comment by Borch — January 15, 2007 @ 5:55 pm
Sounds scary, especially thinking about the future when technology is so advanced that machines, manned by emotionless robots, will precision-disembowel, not just grind us into hamburger like in The Wall.