A cracked smile and a silent POLL - The Knife and Fever Ray Albums Poll

i have done hundred of polls on ILM, this is one of the hardest.

half these albums are like my all-time favorite albums.

this is cruel

Silent Shout forever. Rearranged my brain

half three of these albums are like my all-time favorite. small correction.

I think the first Fever Ray is the one I’m likeliest to return to these days.

Tempted to vote based solely on The Colouring of Pigeons

Go back to that song and the Height of Summer a lot. But I picked a different album and it wasn't a tough choice.

Silent Shout > Fever Ray > Shaking the Habitual

don't care much about the rest apart from the occasional moments like "Heartbeats", "Pass This On", "The Colouring of Pigeons" etc

even Shaking the Habitual spends half its running time being overly self-indulgent, unlistenable, or both

Plunge might rate higher for me than Shaking the Habitual, but slightly lower than Shaken Up Versions, which was not an option in this poll. Still, my pick is Silent Shout.

Arrrgh... it's definitely a toss up between Silent and Shaking. Both have really impacted me and changed the way I think about music and, well, life really.

Ahhh... probably between Silent Shout and Fever Ray, but I actually really like Deep Cuts as well - it may be a bit normie compared to what came later but it's just such a great electropop record.

Prett easy for me, Fever Ray by a long mile.

never got the hang of the fever Ray for some reason. I should go back to it

could've included the live albums and Shaken Up versions

Silent Shout still boringly wins tho

The Knife are probably my favourite band ever but I can still see each of these has weaknesses:

The Knife is too uncertain of itself in places, tentatively promising but not fully realised
Deep Cuts has some of their best songs but also some of their most disposable material
Hannah Med H has some of their best textures but those are too brief and frustrating
Tomorrow In A Year is too attached to its conceptual origins to work entirely as a standalone album rather than a soundtrack
Shaking The Habitual is so admirable in its ambitions but not necessarily as consistently enjoyable
Shaken Up Versions improves greatly on some but not all of its source material
Fever Ray is a monochrome listen, great singles but a static album

(Plunge is excellent)

Silent Shout makes me think of that Kodwo Eshun quote on Underground Resistance: "an object from the world it releases" - to meet it is to engage on its own terms. It still blows me away. Also literally the only interesting thing I did at uni was write ten thousand words on this album for my undergrad dissertation so I kinda have to vote for it, don't I

I will rep for the s/t all day every day on the strength of "Neon" alone

If I'm being 100% honest with myself I need to vote Silent Shout but everyone sleeps on how fantastic the first album is

Voted Deep Cuts because Heartbeats and Pass This On are my favourite Knife songs and because the video for Pass This On is my favourite ever

I think all things considered coldly maybe Silent Shout but voted Deep Cuts because that was the one I fell in love with first

toughest poll yet imo!

excellent post, boxedjoy. you've summed up my thoughts exactly

Yeah, good post. As much as I love 'Shaking the Habitual' and the Fever Ray s/t, this will never not be 'Silent Shout' for me.

Silent Shout is all time but i feel like voting for the Fever Ray debut because of those singles. have played Shaking the Habitual the most as work started letting us listen to music i had it on CD and just played it over and over and over again. the CD version of it doesn't have the 22 minute song, so it was an easy listen. that album just means so much to me but still not enough to vote for it here.

Voted Tomorrow in a Year just to give it a fighting chance, but they were really on fire for those few years between Silent Shout and Tomorrow in a Year and I could vote for any of it, including the live album and OAR003.

It's a tough one.

Silent Shout was my intro to The Knife, but I discovered 'Heartbeats' at exactly the same time and I sometimes forget it's not on the same album.
'The Captain' blew me away so much when I first heard it, and still does. Something Shakespearean about it - something like The Tempest or Macbeth. That's the tune which sold me and made me a fan.
I love how ghoulish they sound on SS. The lupine 'HOW! HOW! HOW! HOW! / WHO! WHO! WHO WHO!' parts on One Hit, for example. I'm less of a fan of the middle part, including the singles.

Shaking The Habitual though, that felt revolutionary to me. I had started a band and had seriously started thinking about the music-making process. Not just the process of composing, but the process of coming-up with ideas. I was also in a big Wire-subscribing 'break out the box' fuck conventions mode and the whole thing just clicked into place and shattered my worldview. Not just that, but social politics and soical media were having a big impact on my world. I was commuting to work at The Guardian as a salesperson at the time and there was a trans protest outside the building one night about an article they'd written. Being a smalltown boy, it had literally never occurred to me that trans people were anything more than a sort of sitcom staple. It's not a long time ago, but it had a serious impact on the way I think about the world and society and people. STH conflated everything: music composition, experimental art and intersectionality. I don't listen to it so much these days. Like boxedjoy said, it's an arresting listen, but not an every day listen. It remains a really important album in my life.

good post Dog Latin, this is why i feel like Shaking The Habitual needs more love, it's just such a monumental album. i have only played Tomorrow, In a Year one time, not sure why, but need to rectify that.

Silent Shout and Fever Ray are undoubtedly excellent albums, but Shaking the Habitual feels the most urgent and vital, so that's the one I voted for.

I could flip a coin on SS, STH and FR, today it lands on Fever Ray.

i'm in America ans witnessing our country ripping itself apart, so i took a walk:

"And that's when it hurts
When you see the difference
It's a raging lung
And a difference
What a difference
A little difference would make"

That is such a great song

Does 'raging lung' mean anything or did they just think it sounded cool?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

They're about to launch a livestream to celebrate their 20th anniversary. All their videos then their Coachella performance and then a DJ set from Olof Dreijer.

https://youtu.be/wkUyp1oWbAA

http://static.skaip.org/img/emoticons/180x180/f6fcff/headphones.gif

Olof looks like he could have been a toddler 20 years ago.

He is just taunting us with those background images of beach scenes dancing and discos, though.

The whole thing made me really, really wish that I'd got to see The Knife on the Shaking The Habitual tour. (I only saw them performing Tomorrow In A Year, which was... something really different.) So many of my friends went to see them, and half of them were all "IDGI who is playing what." and the other half acted like they'd had some religious experience where band and audience had merged and everyone had become one orgiastic dancing mass - and now I kinda see what they mean?

I got to see Fever Ray touring the first album and it was the best show I've seen that involved the least effort on the part of the performer - iirc Karin mainly (maybe exclusively) stood still in a freaky animal getup and let the light show and backing track do the heavy lifting. wonderful

Olof was excellent there and those visual effects were the right side of trippy for a quarantine disco

oh boy, oh boy, oh boy

going to tune in now.

Weird. Have drunkenly/randomly ended up playing "Live at Terminal 5" tonight. I think it was partly suggested by a friend watching "Handmaid's Tale" and messaging me about a (non-Knife) track and my brain taking it from there.

Rex The Dog is streaming a live synth Knife tribute special on twitch - deconstructing his Heartbeats remix rn

They never made a better album than Silent Shout, but every time I listen to Shaking the Habitual I appreciate it more. It kinda reminds me of Laurie Anderson's United States Live in scope (though USL is 2 records/like 40 songs longer). I'm not throwing either on very frequently because they're both demanding, ambitious listens, but they reward you for putting in the work.

Having said that, the apex of the Knife's career is/was/will always be the live version of "Heartbeats"