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The Best And Worst Things About The New Knife Album (Which We Admittedly Haven’t Heard Yet) on XLR8R

BEST: The Knife has a new album coming out. Hooray.
Shaking the Habitual will be The Knife’s first official new album since 2006. Folks are going apeshit. Yes, sister-brother duo Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer have since pursued successful solo projects (he as darkly catchy technoist Oni Ayhun, she as alien spellbinder Fever Ray) and one collaborative eye-roller (see below), but fans have been rabid for the return of the idiosyncratic, eerily poppy Knife for many internet moons.

WORST: Jose Gonzalez probably won’t cover any Shaking the Habitual tracks, but Nicki Minaj might.
Gonzalez’s version of “Heartbeats” from Deep Cuts brought both the Swedish-Argentinian singer and The Knife to global attention. But now that dark, pulsing, avant-garde beats are the pop-rap norm, we’re afraid Nicki will cannily update trap with a goth spin and snatch one of the tracks for herself. One the plus side, the thought of The Knife banging from a tinted-window sideshow sounds just about right.

BEST: Shaking the Habitual is not an impenetrable, 92-minute opera about Charles Darwin (or something).
This is electronic music, where we celebrate ambition and difficulty—downright pretension, even. Sure, The Knife deserves major plaudits for going gargantuan in tribute to Origin of the Species with 2010’s Tomorrow, In a Year collab with Planningtorock and Mt. Sims. (We’re not kidding, that really happened.) However… we’re incredibly glad the group did not elect to repeat itself and stab our ears out with more modulated bird noises and incessant noodling.

WORST: The word “epic” will be thrown around a lot.
Shaking the Habitual may not be a 92-minute, impenetrable opera about Charles Darwin or something, but it is 98 minutes long, with 12 tracks ranging in length from 37 seconds to almost 20 minutes. And already the “e” word is popping up in lazy blog post headlines everywhere. There is no escaping it. Everything longer than an animated GIF is epic on the internet. This album is EPIC.

BEST: All that wonderful Knife weirdness appears to be intact.
Freaks rejoice. There are references in the tracklist to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, a decided scrambling of sexual and political identity in the lyrics of first leaked track “Full of Fire,” some comfortably creepy shenanigans in director Marit Östberg’s 10-minute video for the track, not to mention another gender-ambiguous album teaser video. In short, all signs point to a nice but boundary-pushing return to the siblings’ beloved eccentricity.

WORST: The Knife started everything!
From witch house and seapunk to hashtag rap and Tumblr pop, it’s a virtual certainty that disparate musical subcultures will soon start claiming The Knife as mother and father to it all. It would not surprise us to find Frank Ocean claiming them as an influence, right before Deadmau5 disses them for the lulz.

BEST: A world tour will surely follow.
It’s onstage that Karin and Olof truly distinguished themselves from the other progenitors of leftfield electronic sounds, with techno-horror projections, Gaga-foreseeing outfits, quirky-nightmare sets, and lots and lots of fog. A handful of European dates have already been announced.

WORST: That world tour is probably already sold out.
Even before any of the dates are announced, or even planned, the slobbery-fan vultures of Ticketmaster are poised in some queue already, their sweaty palms gripping their mice, anxiously awaiting the first stirrings of any ticket release. You are going to have to pry those golden tickets from the cold, dead hands of some middle-aged electronica fan before you see one glimpse of Karin’s prosthetically melted face. Sorry. :(

BEST: Your edgier gay friends will be bumping this madly.
The jittery electro and avant-goth vibes of Silent Shout and Fever Ray cannily appealed to a large swath of gay men in the later ’00s who wished to appear sophisticated while reconnecting with their Depeche Mode electro-pop roots and jerky dance moves. That guy with the expensive second-hand jeans upstairs, your local dive bartender—hell, even your own boyfriend—will ensure you’ll never have to buy this album to hear it on repeat.

WORST: Your edgier gay friends will be bumping this madly.
You may end up begging them to put some Little Dragon back on for relief.

# YES GOOD The Knife Shaking The Habitual music

Posted 2 months ago 4 notes
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from The Downstairs Mix-Up EP

Out of Touch | The Downstairs Mix-Up

I can’t say much other than this is the best little live act from up in Byron Bay! First time I visited with Matt, Dean & William, we saw them perform when we were out for the night and the energy is just so incredibly infectious. They were performing Stevie Wonder and other old R&B covers then, but I bought their EP when I saw them performing on the street later on during the trip. Just… give them a listen :)

# the female vocalist Sarah Grant has the most incredible stage presence I've ever seen live in an unsigned group so yeah just putting this out there for them The Downstairs Mix-Up unheard music

Posted 2 months ago 5 notes
blackblackgold: THE EMPEROR’S VINTAGE CLOTHES: HOW GOTH & EBM RECYCLED THEMSELVES “Noise is dying. Punk’s been dead. The only rock’n’roll left is in your head.” – Sewn Leather, “No Names” “Meet the new goths. Same as the old goths.” – The Who, “Won’t Go Goth Again”   Like a rather bedraggled and dusty phoenix, goth has rebirthed itself in a way that echoes its 30+ year history as well as explores new ground. Sometime in the mid-late ’00s, post-punk sounds from groups such as S.C.U.M and Kasms brought a darker edge to indie music that hadn’t been so visible in years. To younger ears with few accessible options for this kind of vibe, it was fascinating; to older ears longing for new takes on beloved ideas, it was a godsend. As the likes of Cold Cave, Light Asylum, and Zola Jesus helped redefine classic goth tropes, minimal wave enthusiasts WIERD and Veronica Vasicka were using their labels, parties, and love of classic sounds to attract new electronic producers with a taste for gloom as well as weekly crowds of cross-genre weirdos and trendsetters alike. Slowly an audience was built, partly from scratch—bringing in those drawn to the style and dark glamor of it all—and partly from those bored with the stale, established goth scene and looking for something familiar yet refreshing. READ MORE #a fascinating article concerning an industry where everything, and I mean everything, is latched upon and bled dry I don’t know enough about these genres to accurately comment, but this article is brilliant and well worth a read… especially as social commentary on the growing movement of anti-society ~soft grunge~ in the mainstream. View Larger

blackblackgold:

THE EMPEROR’S VINTAGE CLOTHES: HOW GOTH & EBM RECYCLED THEMSELVES

“Noise is dying. Punk’s been dead. The only rock’n’roll left is in your head.” – Sewn Leather, “No Names”

“Meet the new goths. Same as the old goths.” – The Who, “Won’t Go Goth Again”  

Like a rather bedraggled and dusty phoenix, goth has rebirthed itself in a way that echoes its 30+ year history as well as explores new ground. Sometime in the mid-late ’00s, post-punk sounds from groups such as S.C.U.M and Kasms brought a darker edge to indie music that hadn’t been so visible in years. To younger ears with few accessible options for this kind of vibe, it was fascinating; to older ears longing for new takes on beloved ideas, it was a godsend. As the likes of Cold Cave, Light Asylum, and Zola Jesus helped redefine classic goth tropes, minimal wave enthusiasts WIERD and Veronica Vasicka were using their labels, parties, and love of classic sounds to attract new electronic producers with a taste for gloom as well as weekly crowds of cross-genre weirdos and trendsetters alike. Slowly an audience was built, partly from scratch—bringing in those drawn to the style and dark glamor of it all—and partly from those bored with the stale, established goth scene and looking for something familiar yet refreshing.

READ MORE

#a fascinating article concerning an industry where everything, and I mean everything, is latched upon and bled dry

I don’t know enough about these genres to accurately comment, but this article is brilliant and well worth a read… especially as social commentary on the growing movement of anti-society ~soft grunge~ in the mainstream.

# Jack's commentary is perfectly incisive important music

Reblogged 2 months ago from jackthecb (Originally from blackblackgold) 78 notes