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Apr 23, 2013An exciting, multivalent Dreijer sibling showcase. Karin provides saving shades of humanity by exercising the vocal cords nature gave her. But Olof's imagination, sense of humor, and bent rebop carry the day.
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Apr 9, 2013It shouldn’t work--they went all or nothing. They got all.
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Apr 9, 2013Shaking The Habitual has minor drawbacks—it wastes too much time on shambling instrumentals, and a wall-to-wall rager would have been great—but this brother-sister team is still heroically alienating and giddily perverse.
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Apr 15, 2013If any record of this relatively young year demands your full attention then Shaking the Habitual is it, as it opens up as a vast chasm of unexpected possibilities, and despite any possible subconscious misgivings, you’ll immediately want to jump in without thinking twice.
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Apr 12, 2013They massage the album's plentiful organic charges into a sonic puzzle with an almost symphonic reach, one that's as challenging, bounteous, and ultimately unknowable as anything you'll hear this year.
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Apr 11, 2013Regardless of whether they're successful or not isn't quite the point; what makes Shaking the Habitual so important is that The Knife used an important moment in their own history to truly subvert the hierarchy that both the band and the album exist in. Thankfully, they also wrote some near-perfect music in the process.
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Apr 8, 2013Learning how to untangle one of the richest experimental albums of recent memory becomes a challenge well worth the undertaking.
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Apr 8, 2013At Shaking the Habitual’s core are the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, so rare in the tradition of mostly reiterative pop music that the album feels transgressive, even though its underlying ideologies are reasonable rather than radical.
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Apr 8, 2013If you admire The Knife’s music for its incredible unpredictability and off-the-scale inventiveness, you are likely to consider this to be at least amongst their best work yet.
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Apr 8, 2013The Knife has created a work of art that’s not just a dream waiting to be realized, but a living, breathing reality that’s waking you up to what’s possible in the wildest of imaginations.
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Apr 8, 2013They've never sounded more in tune with the materiality of sound or the sonorousness of the physical world.
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Apr 4, 2013Shaking The Habitual is quite simply a triumph, a bold and experimental statement.
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Apr 2, 2013While some of the abstract material here is frustratingly opaque, how many other ‘pop’ acts can you name that would have the brass cojones to drop a near 20-minute track right in the middle of their record? Astonishing.
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UncutApr 1, 2013This duo's songs are genetic pop mutations, scampering out of control. [Apr 2013, p.73]
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Apr 1, 2013Shaking the Habitual is something else, but it’s hard not to find that profoundly exhilarating.
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MagnetApr 16, 2013Shaking proves from the get-go to be easily the most ambitious and defiantly challenging release in either Dreijer sibling's catalog. [No. 97, p.57]
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Under The RadarApr 1, 2013This is The Knife's show--and we're not allowed to forget that. [Mar-Apr 2013, p.93]
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Apr 8, 2013It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal.
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Apr 9, 2013Judicious use of the skip button to find the tracks on which Andersson’s transfixing voice is front and center, results in a much more rewarding, immediate experience.
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May 30, 2013While the Knife seem to have outlined a much clearer vision for what they were trying to achieve, they do so, crucially, through experimentation starting outward from their own comfort zones, and with almost zero lyrical element.
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The WireApr 24, 2013It's inscrutable and inspired, and this time mystique has nothing to do with it. [Apr 2013, p.51]
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Apr 16, 2013The resulting album, unsurprisingly enough, contains their most texturally diverse work to date.
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Apr 11, 2013It would be incorrect to say that the duo is pushing “weird” to its sonic limits; “curiosity,” mostly in the space of the extremes of human personality, would be most apropos.
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MojoApr 9, 2013While synth stomp Full Of Fire circles the (twisted) dancefloor, the bias is for brave, immersive, and high-risk music. [May 2013, p.88]
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Q MagazineApr 9, 2013Less dazzling than Silent Shout, but The knife still create a world like no one else's. [May 2013, p.105]
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Apr 9, 2013Easy listening this is not, but Shaking the Habitual is at least bold and brash, the work of a band hungry to explore strange sonic textures.
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Apr 9, 2013However difficult the album may be, it's a rare pleasure to see artists who know how to make great pop songs eschewing expectations, growing beyond their previous oeuvre and audience to pursue a brave creative path into genuine 21st century music.
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Apr 8, 2013Despite clear flaws though, enthusiastically raving about the album, even when taking into account that a third of it (including those aforementioned ten minutes of Fracking… ) is borderline irritating, feels entirely justified, rather than an exercise in willful perversion, thanks to the quality of everything else on offer.
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Apr 8, 2013It's long (nearly 100 minutes), strange, disturbing, uncomfortable, challenging. But it never fails to fascinate.
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Apr 8, 2013At its most compelling, Shaking the Habitual is racked with lust, anger and urgent, quaking rhythms.
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Apr 8, 2013Shaking the Habitual isn't as cohesive or accessible as Silent Shout, and after experiencing the whole thing, fans may not return to it often, but it's hard to deny that it's an often stunning work of art.
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Apr 5, 2013It’s an adventure.
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Apr 4, 2013Both heavy and cumbersome and light and uncertain, it will prove difficult for some to find an entrance to it, but once you’re inside you’ll find yourself enveloped by its bold experimentation and the stunning way they execute it.
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Apr 2, 2013Self-possessed and uncompromising, this is a record with regal bearing.
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Apr 8, 2013This music has deep weirdness but incredible will and charisma.
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Apr 8, 2013Sporadically brilliant, perhaps it is The Knife’s Inland Empire--a fearless piece of work with its own logic, one that shears away all safety nets.
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Apr 8, 2013Seven years later, they've released a 94-minute follow-up that explores even wilder styles of mordantly nutso android bleat.
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Apr 8, 2013Of the album's 90-odd minutes (emphasis on odd), Shaking the Habitual features maybe 16 or 17 that fall into place within a canon that also includes the rubbery robo-funk of "Heartbeats" and the atmospheric devastation of "Silent Shout," though in most cases those minutes are buried inside much longer songs, consigning anything remotely hooky into the realm of affectation.
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Apr 4, 2013It’s an admirable pool of ideas, thrilling noises, rare, unpredictable melodies and a huge amount of imagination but to be brutally frank, it doesn’t encourage repeat listens.
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Apr 2, 2013Shaking the Habitual is an entity entirely unto itself; a warm chaos that drinks you in.
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Apr 8, 2013The Knife’s sound and vision--and the members’ unrelenting oddness--seem to slightly buckle under the weight of their idealism.
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Apr 11, 2013Shaking The Habitual is full of thrillingly percussive highs and brilliantly deranged vocals, but overall its anti-pop move is more typical than radical.
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Apr 4, 2013Shaking the Habitual's problem is that the Knife seem to have dismissed the idea of making your point concisely as merely another affectation of a decadent and corrupt society.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 100 out of 118
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Mixed: 16 out of 118
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Negative: 2 out of 118
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Apr 9, 2013
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Apr 10, 2013
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Apr 9, 2013