Silent Shout

I'm pretty keen on it. Nice synthesizers. It's quite unsettling.

heard the title track blaring over a big system on Saturday night and it slayed...although does came achingly close to good old trance. like what i've heard so far of the album

loving it too, its very disonant in places, yet very easy to listen too, "Like a Pen" is my favourite track, more pop than the rest ..

I think it's a good record with some incredible bits. The unhinged, primitivist techno of "We Share Our Mother's Health" is my favorite track--like Mantronix dreaming up "Tri Repetae" as a scene from Legend

I hear something of Kate Bush in the strange conversations struck between the singers different "voicings," which, Philip's right, can be quite unsettling if you really pay attention to them. Yet at the same time it's immediately familiar, even reading as retro-nostalgic, despite not quite sounding like anything I can think of offhand; when evocations of the "future" are themselves nothing new, perhaps the new must appear in the form of the nostalgic, the obsolete, the contradictory

It's this queer familiarity that enables Sherburne's sense of the record's potential popularity, I think. That and the fact that its best songs are catchy as fuck

juliand said:

I think it's a good record with some incredible bits. The unhinged, primitivist techno of "We Share Our Mother's Health" is my favorite track--like Mantronix dreaming up "Tri Repetae" as a scene from Legend

I hear something of Kate Bush in the strange conversations struck between the singers different "voicings," which, Philip's right, can be quite unsettling if you really pay attention to them. Yet at the same time it's immediately familiar, even reading as retro-nostalgic, despite not quite sounding like anything I can think of offhand; when evocations of the "future" are themselves nothing new, perhaps the new must appear in the form of the nostalgic, the obsolete, the contradictory

It's this queer familiarity that enables Sherburne's sense of the record's potential popularity, I think. That and the fact that its best songs are catchy as fuck

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Am finally getting around to hearing this, and enjoying it so far. Wonder if the buzz will last after the newness wears off.

Julian D's comments struck me as spot on. His take on "We Share Our Mother's Health" as Mantronix dreaming Tri Repetae is clever. "Marble House" is almost unsettling, it's so melodic, and goth-epic. I prefer the woman's voice to the man's. If I remember correctly they won't be releasing much material anytime soon, b/c the fellow is pursuing a DJ career in Berlin (I may be misremembering that however).

What do people think of the record?

It is really good. Nothing shockingly fresh, more what your average decent band should be up to in 2006. Think about that: two-thousand-and-six.
If I could go out to local bars and clubs and regularly see this sort of thing on stages I'd be happy.

Excellent album. Still mired in 80s revivalism, but does something very very unique with it, utterly twisted in its mixture of micro-house sound design, cheesy euro-pop, cryptically feminist lyrics and detuned vocal treatments... all backed up with memorable pop tunes and ambient synth ballads... Most alien texture? The syn drum sounds that work almost like an ergonomic minimal house take on Phil Collins' drum fills circa "In the Air Tonight"...

this is an enormously overrated album. some of the drums are good, yes, but the overall effect is of an ugly hodge-podge of minimal, utterly awful euro vocoder pop, cod-autechre (circa incunabula) and poorly executed attempts at orientalism. sherburne is right to talk abouy the use of fifths in his pitchfork piece: they are in fact the basis for almost every song on the album, and from a formal point of view absolutely nothing original, never mind subsersive, is done with any of them. and the "catchy tunes"?? utterly dreck, attrociously cheesy, tired, worn-out, done-to-death refrains.

i have huge respect for sherburne but he is wrong on this one.

You couldn't be more wrong- its brilliance lies in the fact it works from debased musical forms- Euro-pop, Mid 80s Fairlight Rock, Trance (listen to the arpeggiation on the title track... Jesus...) and yet takes that and does something unsettling with it... firstly by taking these forms more seriously than one would expect, and secondly by the incorporation of highly modern sound design in and around these derided sonic signifiers... (so hear the minimal version of a Phil Collins drum fill...) On first listen I deleted the entire album, I thought it was that bad. But over time I thought it might be worth a second listen, and indeed it is. I don't get any sense of Autechre circa incunabula with this record at all. Even the vocoder thing is taken to a ludicrous extreme (this is no mere Daft Punk or Kraftwerk retro-fetish) and the lyrics and detuned, genderless vocals work as a further layer of unsettling... (always playing with your expectations and tricking you into a sense of ease/unease at the inappropriate moment, like the way it often places quite angry feminist lyrics against the softest of musical backings, or the way that the most startling sonic events are frequently those re-contextualised mid 80s bits- that sound more daring than any of the minimal tech plip plop in the rest of the track). Sherburne DOES get things wrong sometimes, but not here, in fact the biggest mistake he's made all year is in lauding the Booka Shade record, which is cheesy and utterly utterly duff... filled with tracks pissing about, never epic enough or pop enough or trance enough (except in the most reductive and UN-EPIC block plastic cheese synth chord manner)
Oh and direct me towards the "fifths" comment, I can't find it... and anyway, using fifths is hardly a notable thing (in either a negative or positive way) surely?

gek-opel said:

You couldn't be more wrong- its brilliance lies in the fact it works from debased musical forms- Euro-pop, Mid 80s Fairlight Rock, Trance (listen to the arpeggiation on the title track... Jesus...) and yet takes that and does something unsettling with it... firstly by taking these forms more seriously than one would expect, and secondly by the incorporation of highly modern sound design in and around these derided sonic signifiers... (so hear the minimal version of a Phil Collins drum fill...) On first listen I deleted the entire album, I thought it was that bad. But over time I thought it might be worth a second listen, and indeed it is. I don't get any sense of Autechre circa incunabula with this record at all. Even the vocoder thing is taken to a ludicrous extreme (this is no mere Daft Punk or Kraftwerk retro-fetish) and the lyrics and detuned, genderless vocals work as a further layer of unsettling... (always playing with your expectations and tricking you into a sense of ease/unease at the inappropriate moment, like the way it often places quite angry feminist lyrics against the softest of musical backings, or the way that the most startling sonic events are frequently those re-contextualised mid 80s bits- that sound more daring than any of the minimal tech plip plop in the rest of the track). Sherburne DOES get things wrong sometimes, but not here, in fact the biggest mistake he's made all year is in lauding the Booka Shade record, which is cheesy and utterly utterly duff... filled with tracks pissing about, never epic enough or pop enough or trance enough (except in the most reductive and UN-EPIC block plastic cheese synth chord manner)
Oh and direct me towards the "fifths" comment, I can't find it... and anyway, using fifths is hardly a notable thing (in either a negative or positive way) surely?

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well having listened to it two and a half times now (after mildly enjoying a couple of tracks on a first listening) i am yet to see this "greatness". so to start with the trance arpeggios: ok, they work well on the opening track, which is undoubtedly a promising beginning. however the riff in the following "neverland" falls flat. or rather, it sounds like the soundtrack to empty triumphant air-punching and is nowhere near strong enough to carry the track.

and i do NOT find this record "unsettling". having burned the album to cdr and listened to it in the car knowing absolutely nothing about the band (i got a second-hand recomendation, without having read sherburne's piece) it had every opportunity to do so, but actually only led to some generic confusion (and the fun game of spot-the-reference). and taking the reference points seriously and bringing them up to date with modern sound production is hardly original.

sherburne on the use of fifths? - here you go:

""Neverland" doubles Karin Dreijer Andersson's vocals across an unusually uncomfortable fifth; usually that interval should feel grounding, but here it leaves you on edge, as though uncertain as to which part of the harmony were the dominant element."

and i can't believe you didn't pick up on the incunabula rip-off/reference alex: listen again to the intro to "marble house" (the vocal melody on that track, once it kicks in, is probably the most irritating on the album). in fact i found these "detuned, genderless vocals" the record's weakest point: to be unsettled by something you need to be drawn in, won over, and for me this never happened. a useful point of comparison is green gartside: as discussed at length on blissblog and k-punk, his vocals really ARE unsettling, because his voice is fascinating, unique, other-wordly....a further exmaple of unsettling vocals is of course scott walker....the point being again that his vocal performance is immediately arresting, and unforgettable....

all that being said, as sherburne puts it: "They certainly know their way around dance music's sonic vocabulary", and the textures are great. but they're not used as sophisticatedly as by villalobos, or luciano, or onur ozer, or any number of minimal producers, and neither are they enough to carry the whole album.

The point is the most unsettling moments are the confrontation between art and some of the most derided sonics of all time... that double take thing (which incidentally the very best Scott Walker engages with cf the Electrician- although admittedly with a far more purposive interaction between MOR- the lush string driven mid section- and lyric- the feeling of pure happiness and delight in the mind of the torturer). The discomfort with the Knife is internalised, that inner voice always asking you "is this too cheesy?"... So the unsettling occurs at the level of being repulsed, but interested (similarly with Green Gartside, tho to be honest, I remain repulsed, albeit still able to enjoy his lyrics on the page). It is this irritation and repulsion which is the interesting bit! In a way I view them as a deliberate and art house-goth version of "guilty pleasures"...

The ultimate flaw with the Knife of course is that in essence they are basically working within post-modernistic techniques, which makes "Silent Shout" merely a pretty great album, enjoyable, idiosyncratic, but not groundbreaking or in any way a "new thing".

I'm surprised by all the handwringing in this thread over <i>Silent Shout</i>'s alleged postmodernity, retroism, revivalism etc. Granted it's using synth riffs and stiff-sounding beats but I don't think that it is more indebted to the past than any other current music - including all of Dissensus's sacred touchstones. Kate Bush X Minimal X early Bel Canto X <i>Empires & Dance</i> X Autechre is a pretty audacious intersection of influences.

Surely at least as audacious as Horsepower Productions X Basic Channel X DJ Shadow, or Incredible String Band X The Flaming Lips X early Verve, or anyother intersection touted as innovative in 2006.

I sometimes suspect people just assume that sonic similarities to electroclash/80s make something hopelessly retro and proceed no further with this line of inquiry, as if somehow the 80s are bracketed within a notion of revivalism which other decades are not (the 70s in particular seem to escape this fate).

If more song-orientated bands took influence from Autechre in the same way the new romantics took influence from Kraftwerk, then the pop landsscape would be a far more interesting place.

kate bush

if only i heard kate bush in 'silent shout'! to me the knife's vocals sound like the work of a lower-rent bjork who forgot to take her meds. their "innovations" are about as keen as bjork's, too. blips and beeps do not always the next kraftwerk make.

this range of influences that we're mentioning--"Kate Bush X Minimal X early Bel Canto X Empires & Dance X Autechre"--is an amazingly relevant one, and yes, audacious. but this is exactly why the knife disappoint. in terms of musicanship, you could do something much more startling and interesting with fifths. i get this slightly rockist inclination when i hear them--i want to tell them to practice their instruments for a couple years and get back to me.

good psychedelia needs to transcend revivalism (and "goblin" imagery, yawn). it has to be more than mimetic. the knife may get there, but they're definitely still on their way.

anyway, i'm new, and i'm just reading through the music threads here, but i was so excited to read swears and others challenge this vastly overrated album/artist that i wanted to jump in.

I'm not exactly challenging it, it's a good album. But I think everybody's been deluged with so much trad, retro crap recently, this sounds far more innovative than it actually is.
If you had a more popular milleu of this kinda stuff, genuinely fresh acts would emerge.

musically, at least, I find the "techno" on Silent Shout to be pretty traditional, in a sort-of EBM-lite vein...but it's what they do with their (her) voice(s) that I find to be really interesting, almost shocking...

Right. I find Silent Shout predictably "innovative" in 2006 in the same way I found Kid A successfully but predictably tapped into the Zeitgeist, nowhere near as fresh and unsettling as critics at the time did.

I agree with Tim when he says the 80s are somehow bracketed off as singularly vunerable to cheesy revivalism. Personally, I think freakfolk and a lot of folk-inflected indie rock is just as cheesy and fatally nostalgic as electroclash was. Cat Power isn't somehow less ridiculous than The Bravery, in that respect.

@Tim F: "Silent Shout" is not any more indebted to the past than most other modern music, no, but that doesn't automatically exclude the conclusion that it IS mired in post-modernism, as is most music that isn't mired in retroism (a slight distinction)... with a scant few exceptions. But that's why its a good album, a fun listen, a passable way to expend some time, rather than a brave new world of sound or something. Its probably in the top 5 albums released this year, don't get me wrong, but its. still. not. quite. there. Obviously when listened to with expectations suitably lowered, (as perhaps we must for all music now?) its great.

I, too, think this record is tremendously overrated. Gek-Opel's criticism of the Booka Shade album, which I concur with (ultra-dull pretentious trance-muzak, eeriely similar to prog-trance), could be levelled at Silent Shout too: "filled with tracks pissing about, never epic enough or pop enough or trance enough (except in the most reductive and UN-EPIC block plastic cheese synth chord manner)," I would also add: never aurally exciting enough. I don't buy the argument that you have to live with the album for a long time in order to get it either, that's true for almost any non-pop-mainstream album you wish for mention, so it doesn't mean squat.

I liked, loved even, some of the songs on their last album though, and the Radio Slave Remix of We Share Our Mother's Health is one of my favourite tracks of the year (minimalism at its best—check it out if you haven't already!), so I can't dislike them through and through.