The Knife – Tomorrow In A Year (with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock) (Brille)
4/5
By: Hayley Sleigh
I received The Knife’s latest album in a large package, and considered for a second or two that it might have been an early April Fool’s joke from the boys at Rockfeedback. I don’t know what it was about my music review work of late, including my recent two page long article about Lady Gaga’s hair and Beyonce’s boob juggling, that made my wonderful editor Tom believe I had the ability to do justice to The Knife’s two disc electronic opera on the life of Charles Darwin and his theories on the evolution of the species, which aims to ‘challenge the conventional conception of opera music’.
My iTunes has classified this album as ‘unclassifiable’, to which I say: abso-f**king-lutely. I’m not going to beat around the bush here – it’s a lot of noise. There are bird sounds, wind sounds, some plinky plonky water sounds and a whole lot of beeps. The intro hurt my ears a little bit, and I genuinely thought my alarm was going off for about twenty seconds during ‘Seeds’, the only song on the album which sounds anything like the kind of Knife song a fan would recognise (although, I don’t think the beautiful ‘Annie’s Box’ and ‘Tomorrow in a Year’ would sound that out of place on Fever Ray, the eponymous debut album from The Knife singer Karin Dreijer Andersson’s solo project).
While none of the album’s sixteen tracks are unlikely to take the top spot in my 25 Most Played songs on iTunes (that spot of course belongs to ‘Sexy! No No No’ by Girls Aloud), I enjoyed Tomorrow in a Year. I believe the world of music is a richer place for having it. Listening to it properly – alone, without distractions - is an intense sensory experience. I found myself entranced by my candle’s flickering flame several times during the first half of the album, and I even felt my heart racing during ‘Upheaved’ and ‘Minerals’.
Since its inception in the late 1970s, the kind of synthpop The Knife specialise in has been connected with certain stories and ideas which are seemingly about as far removed from what we know as ‘nature’ as possible: those of science fiction, set on either a different planet or on an unrecognisable Earth. Early synthpop pioneers like Gary Numan, The Human League and The Normal were influenced by science fiction writers like JG Ballard and Phillip K. Dick, and wrote songs about subjects like robot prostitutes and dystopian societies where humans become sexually aroused by car crashes. Synthesizer music was the soundtrack to the discovery of new life forms and the destruction of nature, as seen in the nightmarish constant darkness of overbuilt cityscapes in films like Blade Runner.
To hear that same type of music (‘Geology’s intro is especially Numan-esque) telling the story of a man living on an island in the nineteenth century, studying birds and writing letters about his beloved daughter Annie, is a breath of fresh air. I would suggest there is a very interesting link between the theories of evolution explored in Tomorrow in a Year and the alternative realities of the works of Ballard, Dick and co: the idea of godlessness. Charles Darwin’s theories and findings have certainly made a lot of people question the existence of a creator God, while the terrifying visions of a future Earth to be found in a great deal of science fiction often involve massive pollution, the collapse of society and apocalypse – if there is a God, it would be nice to think that he would step in before all that took place.
The idea to prise synth music free from the cold metal arms of science fiction and release it into the wild is a fantastic one, and quite a departure for Karin Dreijer Andersson, who as Fever Ray and as one half of The Knife has been transforming herself into a robot with auto-tune for years, with stunning results. Unfortunately, the only sounds on Tomorrow in a Year which I found truly evocative of nature and evolution were the obvious ones: the honking and whistling birds, the wind, the waterfalls, all of which may as well have been natural recordings (and all possibly were - the album was formed by mixing field recordings with artificial sounds.) I doubt that I would have made the connection to nature and evolution at all had I not been searching for it in each track. Nonetheless, The Knife’s latest album is a very interesting and thought-provoking project which will hopefully inspire someone among the latest generation of synthpoppers to push at the boundaries of the genre and create a piece of music which paints an even more vivid picture than Tomorrow in a Year does. The evolution of synth music: you heard it here first.
Artists in this article: The Knife
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