Key Tracks: "A Tooth For An Eye," "Networking"

To truly love someone is to understand them, and it’s definitely not easy to understand The Knife. Superstar sibs Karin and Olof have created something bigger than the both of them: a colossal, offbeat project that seemed like it would never be the same after the massive success of their previous album.

While Silent Shout remains one of the most innovative and immersive albums of the last 10 years, it’s important not to forget that before they made songs like “Marble House” or “Forest Families,” they made songs like “Lasagna” and “Hangin' Out.”

A crucial aspect of The Knife is that they love pranks. The duo has a sinister sense of humor to accompany their dark sound. Hearing Karin sing “I let my dick hang out of my pants / So I can point out what I want” obliterated any notion of The Knife ever being pigeonholed.

Seven years, one solo album, one opera and a shit-ton of speculation later, here we are. Here we are indeed. Shaking the Habitual is an intimidating 97 minutes in length and showcases the duo approaching their music from a completely different angle.

The album swivels unpredictably from the chaotic to the slow, boring and conceptual to an almost comical extent. While listening to The Knife has always required a bit of forgiveness on the listener’s part, at moments this album is simply punishing in its inaccessibility.

That being true, it still commands attention.

It’s like having a girlfriend that you are convinced you love to death and you can’t wait until she gets back from a summer abroad in Spain. But despite all the postcards and Skype dates and long distance phone calls, when she finally gets back she's changed. She's changed and there’s nothing you can do about it yet you remain convinced that she's still the same and it kills you but you fight to find what you once loved about her because you know it's there. You knew her once, after all, but you can’t accept the capacity for change as an innate human quality, and everything in your life will fall apart until you do. You put yourself through this because you love her and love is pain.

Yeah. It’s kind of like that.

The album’s 13 tracks vary dramatically in length and style. Songs like “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” and “Wrap Your Arms Around Me” hover around the five minute mark, while “Raging Lung” and “Full of Fire” clock in at around nine or 10 minutes.

All are eclipsed by the monolithic “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized,” which runs for an excruciating 19 minutes. Sonically, true to form, no two songs sound the same.

To say that The Knife’s music adheres to or contains elements of familiar genres in electronic music is impossible. Sure, some of these songs, like “A Tooth for an Eye,” or “Networking” wouldn’t be out of place in a club, but it would have to be a very strange club--maybe a place where you aren’t allowed to talk and everyone is stripped to his or her underwear and has the same catatonic facial expression.

Including slower, more ambient tracks is new territory for The Knife. While the songs of albums past were much poppier, Shaking the Habitual dedicates a large chunk of its run time to exploring the spatial relationships between the music and the listener, at times unbearably claustrophobic and at others sparse and reserved. Imagine a colossal rusty boat scraping through an ice floe, or a thin white hand silently gesturing into the darkness.

Listening to these songs with headphones in front of a library computer is obviously pretty underwhelming, but as the soundtrack to a long, solitary drive with the stereo cranked, these songs are sonic sculptures bursting with unexpected emotion and depth.

Amidst all this Karin flexes her inimitable vocals like never before. Her pitch rising and plummeting unexpectedly, she embodies a grotesque sexless monster with cracked mud for skin and its bottom jaw swaying as if it were broken. Contrasting greatly with the droning of the album’s slower moments, Karin’s vocal solos become a definite highlight.

Admittedly, listening to Shaking the Habitual is a daunting task. Amidst the chaos of daily life, sitting down to listen to an hour and a half of music is damn near impossible. While overly long and pretentious at times, there are moments of pure awe and spectacle unlike anything else.

When the album is finally over there is an aching emptiness--the memory of a taste fleeting yet decadent. The only way to recapture that sensation is to listen to it again.