Silent Shout

Silent Shout is the third studio album by the Knife, Karin Dreijer and Olof Dreijer. Rabid Records, their own label, released it in Sweden on 17 February 2006. Britain received it on 20 March through Brille. They recorded it in Stockholm between March 2004 and November 2005. It is darker than Deep Cuts, the 2003 album that had carried Heartbeats into other people’s mouths. The darkness is a method. A voice is moved off its natural pitch until the person singing becomes a character. The live show that followed used masks. Pitchfork’s Mark Pytlik, reviewing it on 13 February 2006, heard Karin’s performance as a line running through Björk, Ari Up and Siouxsie Sioux, and gave the album 8.6.

The songs people kept are the title track, We Share Our Mothers’ Health, Marble House and Like a Pen. They are synth-pop and they are techno, and they do not pick a lane in the way a playlist category wants. Olof’s programming is dry and physical. Karin’s writing is about bodies, illness, family, fear, sung by a voice that has been edited until tenderness and threat share a timbre. Heartbeats had been pretty enough to be covered into a different career. Silent Shout refuses that prettiness without giving up the melody. That is the grown-up version of the group.

Swedish pop in that decade was about to be a global export with a smile. This record is the other Swedish electronic object: a brother and sister, their own label, a year and a half in Stockholm, a British licence two months later, and a reviewer in February already sure it was among the year’s best. The masks were the photograph. The pitch-shift is the composition. Play the title track loud enough that the bass becomes a room.

Sources

• Silent Shout: Rabid, Sweden, 17 February 2006; Brille in the UK on 20 March 2006; recorded in Stockholm.
• Mark Pytlik, Pitchfork, 13 February 2006: Silent Shout, 8.6.