#297 The Knife - Tomorrow, In a Year

Chad also recommended this one with reservations. Duly noted.

The Knife isn't a straightforward band or anything, but after five minutes of aimless noise I started to wonder what the story was and looked this up. Apparently this was a soundtrack for an opera about Charles Darwin, and that helps the otherwise fragmented vocal snippets make a bit more sense. A bit.

Where to start on this. On one hand, its kind of brilliant. It's certainly experimental, in sound, in instrumentation, in structure, in pacing. It is full of field recorded noises, vocal crooning across octaves, ominous drone and buzz, keening electronic scree and chirp, and other ambient whatnot, eschewing any kind of beat for 10, 20 minutes at a time. The main backbone is the lyrics, which, while disjointed and repetitive and unpredictable all at once, circle around themes of science, uncertainty, struggle and insights lurking just out of sight, painting a picture of a mind unmoored.

And it goes on and on, formlessly, across two discs, never really settling into anything resembling an album structure*, but it's strangely compelling if you're in the right mood. This was good flower arranging music.

The real moment, fuck, especially now that I listen to it again now though, is Colouring of Pigeons. It is just an amazing song, surging with strings, vocal chirps and swoops, and an actual cohesive, chorus-like harmonized hook, whoosing, winding helixical for 11 minutes, evoking interlocking, wheeling slashes of birds in flight. It's especially powerful as a payoff for all the aimless noise that came before, as everything gels, as the previously suggested seeds sprout all at once. Its a patience-reward up there with Dusk at Cubist Castle's transition from Green Typewriters 8 to Green Typewriters 9. I wish that there was more like on the album, but maybe it wouldn't have had the same power if there had been more of it.

That song aside, I can't say I really feel a need to endure this again. Its another one of those "glad I heard it, won't hear it again" types that I never know how to rate. I think as those things go, my once-through was a pretty damn compelling experience, and that one song is really an ass kicker. Heck, 11 minutes is 4 songs for some bands. It's either stingy or generous, or both, to say 3.5/5

* Which, right, makes sense, given that this was meant to accompany visual stimuli that the listener isn't privy to, but I gotta evaluate it for what it is if its getting released as a standalone entity.