The Knife: Tomorrow, In a Year
The Knife, in collaboration with Mt.Sims and Planningtorock: Tomorrow, In a Year
Sunday, 07, Mar 2010 04:30
By Jack Clark.
Rabid/Brille Records, out now
What's it all about?
Tomorrow, In a Year, produced in collaboration with Mt.Sims and Planningtorock, is an album about Charles Darwin, science and field recording from Swedish nut jobs the Knife - siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson.
Who's it by?
The Knife - a pair of genre-hopping Swedes who love Salvador Dali and 'hate capitalism' (sigh...). Previously, they've made the towering, funky electronica album Deep Cuts in 2003. After they started blowing up thanks to Jose Gonzalez's cover of a song from the album - Heartbeats, from the Sony advert - they went dark, performed a few gigs (in masks, in 2005), then descended into Radiohead territory by holing up and keeping schtum until the release of seminal album Silent Shout (2006).
Pretty soon after it came out, Silent Shout was recognised as a masterpiece: brooding, writhing skeins of synthesisers and keyboards set beneath female singer Andersson's astoundingly weird voice, accompanied by jarring drums and a jazzed up Kraftwerkian sense of rhythm and play. Since then, people have been waiting for something new.
As an example...
"Beak shapes, skeletal traits/Runts and carriers/Wooden hexagonal cage/Pouters and fantails/Talk feathers at what age?/The delight of once again being home/Grey and white spotted/The delight of once again being home." - Colouring of Pigeons
What the others say
"The second disc offers more operatic beauty set against jarring soundscapes, although the Stygian mood abates for the exotic percussion, bowed strings and rhythmically interlocked vocal patterns of Colouring of Pigeons. Several marginally more orthodox, non-operatic songs follow, with Karin finally taking the mic." - BBC,
"A mezzo-soprano will often burble over atonal analogue synth passages, illustrating everything from biological processes to the cadences of Darwin's prose. There are pockets of beauty here well worth locating in among the sound of amoebas swimming in primordial soup." - the Observer,
So is it any good?
Yes. Yes and yes and yes. Longplayers are meant to be challenging. Longplayers which are spread over two CDs are going to be difficult. Longplayers which are in fact operas based on a mixture of field recordings, genetic tree diagrams (thanks, Richard Dawkins) and the writings of Charles Darwin will make your eyes cross and brain start syncing with the statis washing through the recordings. But, please, relax. This is a challenge you'll want to persevere with.
You have to persevere, because with Tomorrow, In a Year the Knife have entered the musical territory and ambience of great jazz artists like Eric Lewis and Miles Davis or electro-innovators like Amon Tobin and Autechre.
It's a tough album and, at times, does sound like the most minimal forms of glitch electronica, but when you set this against the occasional soaring vocals and anthemic, beautiful tracks like Colouring of Pigeons and The Height of Summer it all falls into place. Entropy dissipates. Order reigns. And so on.
This is meant to be unpleasant because so is evolution. It is meant to have failed sections because evolution fails. And this argument isn't circular - it's sonically true: the album moves you by virtue of its sparseness. The scope and scale of the thing at times defeats the music on a second-by-second and (during parts of the first disc) minute-by-minute basis, but this doesn't mean it's bad. It means that you really pay attention when the separate elements come together.
Desolation heightens moments of beauty (see: Schindler's List, Cormac McCarthy's The Road or any music produced by Machine Fabriek). And when Andersson's voice starts ripping through the album on the second disc your back stiffens and the strings and keys and drums all begin to clutch at each other and uneasily miscegenate. The album coalesces before your eyes. Screw singles - they'll never show you this level of progression.
8.5/10