I hesitate to assign a value to all this, but I wonder to what extent that Knife show was the limit of my existing ironically — the endzone for how much I can write off and explain away before I stop underestimating objects and am forced to deal with unmediated experiences. Before “uncomfortable” turns to vomit. Think of all the ironic deflections masquerading as insight here: the Jack/Meg “are they really siblings” stuff, the Blue Man Group allusion, the remark about a song based on “Hansel and Gretel” being “pretty funny stuff.” I wonder whether that’s my way of avoiding the disgusting truths of this music, the latter-day paralysis it depicts: “Wish I could speak in just one sweep/What you are and what you mean to me/Instead I mumble randomly.”

At a certain point — I don’t know when and I doubt many people even care — I wonder whether we can move beyond the “Hey look I get it, it’s ‘Hansel and Gretel!’ ” type of listening experience that turns albums into word-find-like whodunits and songs into soundbytes and ask ourselves why a story like “Hansel and Gretel” exists in the first place, let alone why we’re still talking about it. Plus, beyond the technophobia, and the pomo paralysis, and the communications-breakdown undertones, Silent Shout’s other devastating reminder is that all recorded music is a lie. No recording, even the simplest, cleanest singer-songwriter acoustic studio session, is without compression on the microphone, slight distortions — deceptions — from the tape. To say nothing of the fact that music is itself a crutch. It’s much easier to say “I love you” with a well-placed chord to tame the blush and an untrained voice to make it sound real (i.e., “from the heart”). These as are much affects as the Dreijers’ contorted vocals; no sound is untreated, unwrenched. No, that’s not news, but Silent Shout is a prime cut. From “From Off to On”: “We cannot wait much longer/We want happiness back/We want control of our bodies/Everything we lacked/I think I even liked it/If the feeling was mine.”

“Hansel and Gretel,” by the way, goes like this: this family is really poor, starving to death, and mom decides she’d rather save herself and her husband than her two kids. She persuades dad to ditch the kids in the woods. The kids find their way back. Dad loses the kids in the woods again. Still, the kids try to make their way back, confident that their henpecked dad who keeps abandoning them still loves them. The kids finally make it back home a second time by riding this duck across a river, and with mom out of the picture, Hansel, Gretel, and dad “lived together in perfect happiness.”

The Knife’s point — at least one of them, I think — is that these kids could ride a duck across a river because they were skin-and-bones famished. The kids lived because they barely weighed a thing.

On the Web
The Knife: //www.theknife.net/

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