The Knife - Shaking The Habitual
 

http://i.imgur.com/1ZdUruW.jpg

The Knife - Shaking The Habitual
4/8/2013

1. A Tooth For An Eye
2. Full Of Fire
3. A Cherry On Top
4. Without You My Life Would Be Boring
5. Wrap Your Arms Around Me
6. Crake
7. Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized
8. Raging Lung
9. Networking
10. Oryx
11. Stay Out Here (Shannon Funchess, Emily Roysdon and The Knife)
12. Fracking Fluid Injection
13. Ready To Lose

I got a couple of tracks in (up to the 18 minute one) and gave up. It felt too ambitious, too contrived. It's trying too hard to be this great masterpiece.
These are my first impressions. I will try again because I do like the band but this album reeks of overkill thus far. I am abstaining from voting until I give it a complete run through but it seems like it's going to require a lot of effort.
What did you think EG?

Kill that 19+ minute track and what remains is pretty stellar. That said, it will take much more than my 2 listens so far to really get my head around this.

I didn't occur to me that Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized is completely ambient. I could do without. But the rest is, I agree, pretty stellar. The Knife's experimenting all the time, but this has to be their most experimental album. I'm enjoying quite a bit.

I'm a little bit confused by the long track as well. Does the guy really take so much pride in it that he thinks it should be the centerpiece of the album? It's fairly dull. The rest of the album is often great. A lot of synth-pop, and also a lot of ambient wanking in the 8+ minute songs. I don't mind hearing Olof's self-gratification because he usually jerks it skillfully. But I'm partial to the poppier parts, and there's enough of those here that I think I like this may be my favorite of their albums.

I think it just proves that bigger isn't always better. Most of the album is self indulgent ambient wankery. It's just too much to sit through and it neglects the things I liked about Deep Cuts and Silent Shout such as the catchy poppy hooks.
It was a real effort to get through the album last night and I can't imagine completely getting behind this unless I was out of my mind on drugs and/or time was moving really fast.

Also - one track is just the girl going 'eeeeeeeeeee' like she's a retarded child making mouth noises and another track sounds like a gaggle of geese.
A flaming pile of overproduced sh*t that hipsters will still maintain is a fantastic record.

EDIT: my two out of five rating was overly generous.

Nearing the end of my third listen...going with 4 stars for now, potential for more later. Guess I'm a hipster.

Haha I was gonna say I'm a hipster too. Seems like the majority of people who hear this album are hipsters also.

Listening to music does not a hipster make.