THE BEST BEFORE DATE - 2006 - Marble House by The Knife

Whatever, Olaf & Karen Dreijer were set on when they formed The Knife in 1999, it was generally a pretty disjointed mode. An electronic based brother and sister duo notable for the studied furiousness with which they pursued their eclectic muse. Their first two albums, The Knife 2001 and Deep Cuts 2003, were composed of tracks where each one was going off on an entirely fresh oblique tangent from the last. Then they wrote the track Heartbeats, which they sold to Sony to be used on an advert, that went viral and became a hit for Jose Gonzales in 2003. Suddenly they were awash with money in a swanky new studio they could afford to build for themselves. 

Their next album Silent Shout 2006 was by far the most polished and commercially successful recording they made. The oddness was still there, as was their refusal to appear in their own videos, so we still have people miming as them, or animations. The Knife continued being determined to approach everything from the most oblique angle to be found. Much of The Knife's off kilter feel arose out of Karen Dreijer's vocal style. Continually sounding as though she were Bjork's mentally deranged second cousin, which is saying something.

Marble House is a latin tinged track from Silent Shout. It's remarkable in their recordings for the sense of warmth and delicacy with which it deals with its subject matter. The song is about an aging couple living in their home, caring for each other out of love, when this is becoming increasingly more difficult. It is for me one of their finest and most poignant moments.

I cut your nails and comb your hair
I carry you down the stairs
I wanted to see right through from the other side
I wanted to walk a trail with no end in sight

The moment we believe that we have never met
Another kind of love it's easy to forget
When we are all alone then we do both agree
We have a thing in common, this was meant to be

You close my eyes and soothe my ears
You heal my wounds and dry my tears
On the inside of this marble house I grow
And the seeds I sow will grow up prisoners too

The moment we believe that we have never met
Another kind of love it's easy to forget
When we are all alone then we do both agree
We have a thing in common, this was meant to be

Now where's your shoulder, what is its name
What's your scent, say it again
If it goes faster
Can you still follow me
It must be safe
When it's on TV

I raise my hands to heaven for curiosity
I don't know what to ask for, what has it got for me
The others say we're hiding, it's as forward as can be
Some things I do for money, some things I do for free

After this, the duo deliberately set out to sabotage their own pop success. This involved doing what they'd previously done by instinct, but this time very very self consciously re-asserted.  All the disconcerting playfulness, charm and freaky fun, replaced with confrontational weirdness, underpinned with a left field gender politics. With the album Shaking The Habitual, the last from this duo, their was still a glimmer left of the old The Knife there, in amongst the radical sloganeering. But it often felt as though this was far too forced and stridently contrived. 

Karen Dreijer, went off to do Fever Ray, which, aside from the debut album that was perfect, has proved eventually to fall fowl of the same bizzare strained over stretching for oddity over originality, that plagued the final years of The Knife. Olaf has also released stuff since the The Knife, but hardly noticed in the UK. Though never actually finished, The Knife is still in the position of being temporarily shelved, with occasional flurries of excitable rumours about reforming, which have not yet surfaced into being found to be true.