Shaking The Habitual
by The Knife

From HoldenM TOP 100 COMMENTER 05/11/2013 07:52 | #75780 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

I was particularly apprehensive to delve into this album. The running time and density that I had been hearing about certainly didn't inspire much confidence. And you know what? It turned out fine, because this album is incredible. Yeah, some of it is a bit self-indulgent and seemingly arbitrary, but at least the randomness and excess are interesting. After listening to this album five times in a row, it has grown on me. There's not a track I don't like, not a moment I don't enjoy this album. One of the best of the year for me so far.

Like having to cross the entire world completely naked and with nothing to defend yourself except your own conscious, and being forced to confront every problem both personal and political. Which is to say it's exhausting in every sense of the word and not really something one would want to re-experience any time soon. Yet it still is an unshakeable experience that just gets under your skin, freezing your bone and toying relentlessly with your state of mind. Works better as an epic mood piece than as a broad political polemic.

From RockyRaccoon TOP 100 COMMENTER 07/09/2013 19:28 | #80707 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

I want to like this album, I really really do. Most everyone else seems to love this album, but I just can’t. And I feel like this is one of those albums that, were I to tell someone that likes it that I didn’t like it, they’d just tell me that I didn’t “get" it. That seems to be the case with most avant-garde music like this. Either you love it, or you just don’t “get" it.

I will say this, this album is certainly ambitious, and I admire The Knife for that. It’s over 90 minutes long, so essentially it’s a double album, it’s very political and it has a lot of moving parts to it. There are some good moments on here, the first few songs are pretty good, and in most of the songs there’s parts here and there that are pretty interesting, but there’s also a lot of parts that just go nowhere. Take the epic, 19-minute-long “Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized" for example. The majority of it is barely audible bass drones. Around the nine-minute mark it gets a little interesting, but after that, it’s nothing much.

I want to like this album, but I just can’t, it just stagnates too much for me, it sits in one place and goes nowhere.

From Hayden TOP 100 COMMENTER 04/06/2013 15:38 | #71614 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

They certainly aren't bad tracks.. But when I listen to an album by this sort of group, I'm really not looking forward to listening to the combined half-hour of drone that comes from Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized & Fracking Fluid Injection. Sorry... Maybe if they released those two songs on a separate EP that would've been cool.

Is this better than Silent Shout? Meh. I don't really care. The band has changed a lot since then. I wouldn't even compare the two albums. The first two tracks are almost punk songs in my eyes... just pure protest.

But, with that in mind, that just brings me back to feeling like the album is unorganized... It's not bad by any means.. but.. just messy. I'm not sure if I'm disappointed or not..

Also, that cover art is still hideous an the use of shutterart on it or w/e it's called, is unforgivable....

I feel like this album was kind of brought down by excessive electronic droning noises, but the high points of this album are really soar and personally A Tooth For An Eye is the best song of 2013 and maybe even the 2010's in general. It's also an album that you listen to once and makes you super uncomfortable, but eventually draws you back in and makes you addicted to some of the songs on here. This album would be perfect without some of the songs on here, but I guess thats what you get when you decide to poop out 100 minutes of electronic music.