Story Time

Once upon a time, I was fourteen years old and had a massive unrequited crush on a bitch. Now, I realize that you're reading this on the internet, land where pointed diction goes to die, but this is important: when I say "bitch", I mean it in the "you are demonstrating conduct unbefitting a human being" way that you mean it in your head when you find out your boss really didn't need you to come in to work at seven o'clock or when the DMV desk drone decides to go on break right when you get to the front of an eternal line. I mean, fuck, one night she collaborated with a couple of her other friends to trick me into thinking I was being asked out by some other immensely cute girl at my middle school, a plan so successful that I still don't really enjoy talking on the phone more than a decade after the fact. Yes, obviously I need to tone down my sensitivity somewhat (although I hasten to add that this is far from the only example I could roll out), but still: what a bitch, right?

To my friends' credit, they did try to warn me; it turns out, however, that my friends are wrong even when they happen to be right. Their reasons, after all, had to do with her perceived coldness, her so-called snobbiness, her demands for attention, her forthright willingness to piss all over everyone's good time if it didn't match up with the way the world presented itself to her - seriously, could a girl as antisocial as that ever have been anything other than my dream girl? I mean, I've recognized those same characteristics in plenty of girls since then, and I've learned that, freed from the context of my D-Boogie friends' judgement, "coldness" can come across a lot more clearly as "dry humor", "snobbines" as "taste, "demands for attention" as "interesting" (or at least "playing to my particular mental pathologies"); it's at least plausible that the situation in 1994 might not have been too different, only I was the only one to read it correctly. This interpretation is, of course, bolstered significantly by the fact that my friends never did manage to point out that she might just be a bitch because, y'know, she really got off on being cruel to me, a way better trait of bitch-hood than being confoundingly loyal to your Tori Amos CDs.*

Which brings me to The Knife's Silent Shout.

I realize that pretty much every post on This Here fine MP3 blog brings tidings of some new and definitive This Time I Mean It Guys album of 2006, but seriously, This Time I Mean It - Silent Shout is the best album I've heard since Delia & Gavin and Rachel Stevens conspired to push my wig right off my head towards the tail-end of fall '05, and I say that as someone who really likes those Clipse mixtapes. Obviously, I wouldn't place any bets on that situation staying constant (insert usual spiel for nu hottness from Black Leotard Front/Guillemots/the Rapture/Scissor Sisters here), but take it from someone who's spent a fair bit of 2006 deepening their already-cavernous appreciation for synthpop albums - Silent Shout is an insanely good synthpop album in the truest sense of the word (i.e. it's the type of album the Killers would shrug off but Fischerspooner would privately cut themselves to make).

The Knife, "Like A Pen"

The key term in play here, of course, is "synth"; it's just not in play the way you think it should be. Silent Shout does make exclusive use of synths, yes, but it's arguable that it could just as easily be made with traditional instruments - obviously it wouldn't be as good, but the technology the Knife are celebrating is less tied to the music than it is to how the music ends up sounding. No less an authority than Phillip Sherburne has called Silent Shout as (paraphrased) the Discovery of techno, and the more time I spend with the Knife's album, the more inclined I am to agree - it flaunts the virtues of actual techno music (not, repeat, not "electronica" - what I wouldn't give to see an end to the conflation of those two terms) the way Discovery beat everyone over the head with the virtues of stoopidly unsophisticated house music in a way that even the staunchest Speedwagon fan would have a hard time ignoring. I mean, I don't know about you, but I remember when "Harder Better Faster Stronger" hit - to this day, it's not even in my top five favorite Daft Punk songs, but I'd have an easier time forgetting my own name than forgetting how omnipresent that song's effect was; even the people who hated it were just having the opposite reaction to the most forthright explication of Why The Kids Listen To All That Crazy Nnn-Tss-Nnn-Tss Racket In The First Place, namely that it can be insanely easy to enjoy effects by showing them off in the form of the easiest, most chantable hook since the Trammps settled on a direction in which to burn mothers. "Like A Pen", then, takes the next logical step on by divorcing the effects from crowd-pleasing vocals, and if the end result is one-billionth as commercially viable, it makes up for it by just being flat-out sonically compelling; I don't think a day's gone by when I've passed up the chance to listen to it on headphones just to wallow in the majesty of those cymbals pitching in and out of the red. It's the texture, in other words, that gives Silent Shout its dynamics, and if that sounds boring to you, might I remind you that Guy and Thomas haven't exactly made it clear what exactly we're supposed to be work, make, do or fix. Take my word for it, folx - this shit is fucking awesome.

But, well, that's not exactly the point either.

The Knife, "Marble House" (PTR remix)

See, like most people, I heard of the Knife by way of "Heartbeats", a song which both documents what I want to hear in a pop song to within seventeen or eighteen decimal places and which does a miserable job of telling you what pleasures Deep Cuts, the album it's taken from, has to offer. Deep Cuts is, to be certain, a fine little album, but the dropoff between "Heartbeats" and the rest of it couldn't be much sharper. Obviously "Heartbeats" is a better pop song than, well, damn near anything in the world, but it was also the best example of the Knife's attitude towards Making Songs Sound Very Specific - it sounded as compellingly decayed as anything this side of "Being Boiled", whereas the poor, unfortunate rest of the album just sounded like synthpop, albeit synthpop that was a little more overt about its brutality than most. It was such a precipitous drop-off, in fact, that I kinda ended up writing off the Knife entirely; it is, after all, why you're hearing me flip out about Silent Shout now, as opposed to when it leaked back in December.

Then one night a few weeks ago, fucked up as ever, I stumbled over the PTR remix of "Marble House" over at the ever-majestic 20JFG (I'm posting it here because it's been about two months since they hosted it and it might be disappearing any minute) and, within three minutes and forty-three seconds, had virtually done a complete about-face on the Knife as a whole. It's not even that this mysterious remix (seriously, if anyone knows anything about this PTR character, hit me up) is demonstrably better than the album version - I can easily see a future in which I'm calling the original version of "Marble House" the Knife's best original song - but it's about as explicit a reminder that yeah, those crazy kids in the Knife really are about as arch as it gets. I mean, "Marble House" - any version, really, but especially the PTR version - celebrates classicism the way the Human League used to celebrate classicism's destruction; it moves with the kind of metronomic sweep that always catches me off-guard in John Cale's poppier works (aka the only John Cale works I can bear listening to). And that, as it turns out, was the hook I needed to get me to check out Silent Shout; after all, when you're sold on a band on the basis of a song that hints at the the possible existence of the polar opposite of a Carpenters album, it makes sense that the first thing you'd look for would be a sort of respect for songcraft. And more than anything, that's what defines Silent Shout - it's an album filled front-to-back with brilliantly conceived, gloriously executed songs, even if they happen to be waiting behind two-minute noodling intros or please-god-let-these-just-be-inscrutable lyrics about having a Communist in the family. It is, in other words, gorgeous in a self-respectful way, even if that gorgeousness comes from its savagely uncaring sonics. I mean, sorry Alexis, but that wins the year so far.

I like to think of Silent Shout, then, as having my cake and eating it too - I mean, I got to have all the fun of flipping out over "Heartbeats", then all the exponentially-greater fun of shitting all over my friends' excitement for the new album, and then all the exponentially-greater-than-that fun of actually giving the album a shot and realizing that it's the kind of album that kinda does exactly what I always hoped albums would do. In other words, Phillip Sherburne, Joe Lia, pretty much all of ILM - you were all dead right about this album, just not quite as right in terms of me and this album. Ain't music a bitch sometimes?

(Click here to buy Silent Shout from Amazon.co.uk)

*I do want to point out that since high school, I've run into this girl several times and she's never been anything other than cordial and pleasant, and I'm entirely willing to chalk up her wrecking of my formative years as an unfortunate side-effect of being young and oblivious. I mean, fuck, in sixth grade I helped trick a kid into sitting on an orange; who am I to judge?

ELSEWHERE
- Stampminton! Badstamps! Stampstamps! Stampbad! Oh fuck, I'm nearly winded from excitement - just hustle right the fuck on over to You Know Where and make sure you grab both the remixes of Phoenix' "Long Distance Call" RIGHT NOW. Do it. Phil et al have once again brought heat like a month or two from now, seriously.
- MusicIsNotDead, in the meantime, sold me on the new Camera Obscura album within about two bars of "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken"; I suggest that you pop in over thurr and see if the same thing happens to you.
- And finally, massive update to the links section at right. I suggest clicking every single link until you find the new ones.