Albums of the Decade: The Knife's Silent Shout
by Jeff KlingmanPage 2 of 4
An important subplot in the decade’s pop music narrative was the evolution of technological vocal manipulation across the entire genre spectrum. Thom Yorke famously forced his choir-boy falsetto through a very sullen filter on “Kid A” in the queasy spirit of post-millenial tension. Auto-tune became ubiquitous in radio pop and hip-hop, a transparent manifestation of subtle bum-note tweaking that producers had been doing for ages. The robo-sound eventually became an aesthetic all its own, with no less an icon than Kanye West using his most raw, crestfallen record to test the limits of its nuance on 808s and Heartbreak. At the decade’s end, dozens of DIY upstarts cloaked their singing in all manner of sludge to distract from creaky pipes, or just to cop a disaffected pose. But nobody came close to the hallucinatory fun-house mirror effect that the Knife achieved with Silent Shout.
Fans who knew only basic biographical information about the Dreijers were sure to assume that both siblings had an active singing role on the record. Numerous tracks feature a high and feminine, though palpably unnatural, voice in concert with a separate, deeply intoned and equally unreal masculine counterpart. But every bit of singing on the record (as well as all those nightmarish lyrics) were supplied by Karin, and then fed through differing voice modulations. The way a listener interprets the singing is reflexively, falsely gender-colored, giving certain lines differently resonating meaning. When “We Share Our Mother’s Health” (even its title implies speaking for two) shifts to the lower register for the line “You say you like it/ you say you need it/ when you don’t”, it’s hard not to hear that as a chastising second perspective. It’s even more slippery in “Marble House” when Karin’s relatively un-fussed-with vocal tricks the ear into hearing the secondary voice, a couple octaves down, as similarly unmanipulated male singing. Seldom has the notion of authenticity and gender identity been so screwed with, especially within the confines of a single song. It again recalls the logic of dream analysis, where every distinct character in a particular nighttime vision is perhaps just another aspect of the dreamer.
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