Silent Shout by The Knife
Silent Shout is the third studio album by Swedish electronic music duo The Knife, released on 17 February 2006 by Rabid Records. The album is darker than its predecessor, 2003's Deep Cuts. It spawned four singles: "Silent Shout", "Marble House", "Like a Pen" and "We Share Our Mothers' Health". The album, the music video for the title track and some of the press photos were inspired by Black Hole by American cartoonist Charles Burns. A three-disc deluxe edition of Silent Shout was released in Europe on 2 July 2007 and in the US on 17 July. In addition to the studio album, this package includes the DVD Silent Shout: An Audio Visual Experience—which contains The Knife's live concert in Gothenburg on 12 April 2006, as part of their Silent Shout tour, and all of the duo's music videos to date—, as well as a CD of the concert's audio.
At once massively influential and totally inimitable, The Knife’s third studio album, <i>Silent Shout</i>, made a meteor-sized impression upon its arrival in 2006—a time in which electronic and dance-oriented sounds were starting to commingle with indie-pop’s wistfulness, anticipating the rough-and-tumble thump of bloghouse that was to come. <i>Silent Shout</i> felt and still feels like a true shock to the system, its dark-hued and utterly gothic spin on electronic pop a stark deviation from The Knife’s 2003 predecessor <i>Deep Cuts</i>. That album had earned the group—consisting of Swedish siblings Karin and Olof Dreijer—plenty of attention, thanks to the buoyant single “Heartbeats”, as well as a blog-viral cover from dusky folk countryman José González. If The Knife were previously known for bouncy, slightly off-kilter melodies, <i>Silent Shout</i> represents the duo pouring jet-black oil over their shiny synth sounds, with drum machines ricocheting around Karin’s otherworldly, digitally processed vocals. It’s music that is scary as it is beautiful—like exploring a dark castle by candlelight. The music across these 11 lushly iridescent tracks is as inviting as it is totally strange, and to date, no one’s struck <i>Silent Shout</i>’s alchemical balance: This is an album featuring the psychedelic rush of trance, the clinical pull of German techno, the anguished creep of goth rock and the vibrancy of steel-drum music. And there’s a remarkable tonal breadth on <i>Silent Shout</i>, which features everything from aching monster-movie balladry (“Marble House”) to four-alarm dance-floor ragers (“We Share Our Mothers’ Health”) to wispy, ethereal electro-pop (“Still Light”). Plenty of musicians have since employed bits and pieces of <i>Silent Shout</i>’s framework to great effect, but none have come close to nailing the specific pop weirdness that The Knife achieve here—and that includes The Knife themselves, as the siblings (both separately and together) have continued to chart new and wild territory branching off of this landmark achievement of an album.
