The Kniфe* ‎– Shaking The Habitual

As interesting as this album is, it's a bit of a trainwreck. A bloated monstrous 2-disc assault that takes the weirdness from Silent Shout but removes all pop sensibilities and catchy melodies. You're left with a lot of pure atmosphere and insanity but it all feels extremely hollow for me and more like they are trying to make an artistic statement.

And it feels really hypocritical to release an album with a "fuck rich people" vibe when you're as rich as The Knife have gotten from how much they earned on their earlier stuff. Sorry but maybe if this was their first album I could defend the political feminist punk attitude but from someone like The Knife it just doesn't work.

It's fine having an album with a few lengthy songs but when almost none of the songs here are less than 6 minutes and some of them reach 10-20 minutes in length, you're kind of left with something that is frankly unlistenable on its own unless you just like this sort of stuff.

Personally I much prefer The Knife's earlier stuff and this just feels like they're ending on a very embarassing note for me...

Way too much fillers and the descent tunes are too long. Though there are a handful of nice tunes, it's mostly a waste of vinyl. A2 is a repeated drum driven song that never gets interesing and it's 9 minutes long. Plain repeating boring drum sounds. Why?! And who's waiting for side C?! 18 minutes of boring sounds that's been done for over 50 years already in a much much more fashion, and here there's no drama in what you hear, no theme or tension to be found.
Waste of vinyl space! They should've kept it to single disc.

This is one of my favourite albums of recent times, quite possibly of all time, but I can't say I was super impressed with the mastering on this vinyl edition. Despite the detail and busy-ness of the music, everything feels quite narrow and hemmed in to me, where I would have expected a much greater sense of space and wider dynamics. Just doesn't sound like a very good mastering job for the vinyl format (compare it to another 'experimental' electronic album on vinyl like Rival Consoles' Howl and the difference in quality is stark). Was wondering if anyone else has similar feelings? It's not a terrible sounding record by any means, and the packaging is outstanding, but I'm also painfully aware of how much better it *could* sound.