Silent Shout is amazing. It haunts you like a dark film noir, tempts you with its danceable rhythms, scares you with strange vocals, puzzles you with complex lyrics or gives you chills with its moody melodies. The Knife explores a dark and obscure universe with their ingenious compositions made up of electronic wizardry and poetic brilliance. This will certainly affect you in one way or another, possibly towards an appreciation of this fascinating piece of art.

The Swedish duo consists of brother and sister, Oluf and Karin Dreijer. While the texts are solely Karin’s work, they both collaborate on the music. The singing is mostly done by Karin, even though this isn’t that obvious because of the group’s appreciation for pitch shifting. This makes the vocals change gender with a creepy effect adding to the already perfectly eerie vibe that Silent Shout contains. The heavily synthesized sounds are the perfect match to the close vocals, as their grandiose melodies often set the mood to the beautiful strangeness of The Knife.

Their curious and daring approach to music gives this album a life of its own, showed by tracks like “We Share Our Mothers Health” or “Like A Pen”, which actually made it as dance oriented singles. They could be called the two most upbeat tracks on the album, as they certainly differ in some ways from the rest of the album. But then again, they’re still prominent and defining for the album because of their bold rhythms made of up 80’ies-esque squared drums. The sound matches up with the rest of the album, using keyboard sounds that could seem corny when described, but amazingly enough they pull it off perfectly. Digitalized, grainy synthesizers with a more polished sound than on their earlier album “Deep Cuts” sounding just perfect in content with this duo’s impressive work.

When reaching the end of this album, it’s tempting to play it from the beginning again. Its 11 tracks suck you into a dark universe of bulging sounds that moves closer to you every time you hear it. This is right up in your face; an artful package containing so many qualities in terms of thoughts, music, expressions, feelings and much more of the deep things that The Knife is all about.

by Emil