To all the haters

If you've been to any kind of respectable club in the last year, you no doubt have heard The Knife. The exultant post-disco burner "Heartbeats" (check it at their MySpace) always got the cool kids bumping everywhere I went, what with its perfectly timed handclaps offset by perfect synth fills and calypso fades. It was the closest thing to dance-pop perfection since the heyday of Kylie or Madonna ("Can't Get You Out of My Head" and "Hung Up" notwithstanding). For this very reason, many of my friends have lambasted the latest effort by the Swedish brother sister duo that is Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson. That album, Silent Shout is a conceptual one to say the least. Relating the harrowing story of a prostitute fallen from love to loss, the pair have created a heartbreaking album that could make the Christian Coalition weep--and with sympathy, not pity. And the dark, jumpiness of the music perfectly drives the story...

From the partying highs of a band of womanizers...
"We Share Our Mother's Milk"
(This is as dancy as it gets kids. The ghostly shrieks do spin out into an amazing beat, but if this one won't soothe you, nothing will. You have no taste.)

to the fraught reactions of a dismayed family....
"Forest Families"

ending with the repercussions of an abortion.
"Still Light"

"Was it worth is? Could it be worse than this?" Oli sings through a mountain of vocoding on the final track there. The answer, respectively, is "yes," and "hell no!" After all, Karin admits on the band's (far superior) British Web site that this is the sound The Knife has been working towards for seven years now. I wonder what the haters have to say about that?

Also: in case the introduction to my essay was not enough about the new glory that is blogging, here's some more. Now that I'm off topic and assignment, I'm having more fun, but the confessional, dashed-off informality of blogging has certainly proven exhilarating. I'm also finding it dangerous, however. Without proper editing or proof-reading, I almost add extra T's to words like editting (sic) or leave cliches in place like the one above referring to the CC--yes, I left it to be illustrative. I would never let such an egregious phrase into my real copy. I swear.

(Funny that the Blogger spellchecker doesn't recognize "blogging" as a word, non?)