Shaking the Habitual
Swedish brother-sister duo the Knife's 2006 album, Silent Shout, was a micro-masterpiece of tensely brutal yet richly musical Euro-techno. Seven years later, they've released a 94-minute follow-up that explores even wilder styles of mordantly nutso android bleat: Karin Dreijer Andersson goes all devil-Björk over a sprung-piston rhythm assault on the 10-minute "Full of Fire," and "Networking" is an electro-shrapnel blast where language smears into a kind of Cylon drunk-dial. The album's creepadelic centerpiece is "Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized," 20 minutes of random white noise and cockroach skitter that's like a midwinter nosedive into a black fjord of the soul.