Prominent electro group releases berserk and impenetrable avant-garde opera; blank stares ensue. Sadly, this will probably wind up being the epitaph for Tomorrow, in a Year. No matter which angle you approach it from, the Knife's latest project-- a 90-plus-minute longform work about the life of Charles Darwin-- can seem bewildering. However self-consciously arty and macabre the Knife have been in the past, they've always seemed like a pop group at heart. Here nothing even remotely approaching a steady beat shows up for more than half its length. Whether Knife fans will hang on through the album's formless, screeching opening, or whether opera aficionados will simply regard this as the dabbling of pop-music dilettantes, is hard to say. What does seem certain is, like many difficult, unclassifiable albums before it, Tomorrow, in a Year is fated to be discussed more than actually heard.
Part of Tomorrow, In a Year's dilemma is that it comes contextualized as an opera. For most listeners, opera has vague, mostly derogatory connotations: old, imposing, foreign, dead, faintly ridiculous. And once you invoke opera, the Knife aren't just trying to match their fans' expectations after Silent Shout; they're implicitly demanding to be measured by the same yardstick used to size up, say, Wagner's Ring Cycle. While the designation is, in some senses, accurate-- Tomorrow has a libretto and an operatic mezzo-soprano, and the whole thing was performed in September 2009 by the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma, which commissioned it-- the tag is probably more off-putting than useful for listeners already struggling to locate entry points into this forbidding, oftentimes-alienating work.
Things don't get off to a flying start: Tomorrow, in a Year's first 10 minutes are a painstaking buildup of environmental noises-- a primordial soup of sound appropriate to a work about the origin of life. That's one way of putting it; another might be that it opens with the sounds of a drippy sink and a chain link fence buckling in heavy winds, followed by five minutes of patience-trying buzzing. Where you come down on this spectrum will probably depend on your level of investment, and, more crucially, your listening environment. Taking in the album in different settings gave me a little of both reactions. (At home, in front of massive speakers, following along with the lyrics: absorbing. On an iPod during a morning commute: maddening.) This is deeply un-portable music: It either demands your complete attention or invites you to shut it off.
Once through that opening stretch, your attention will frequently be rewarded. There is powerfully evocative, richly imagined music to be found here. Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer-Andersson's commitment to the Darwinian conceptual framework is complete, sometimes pushing the borders of sanity: Olof Dreijer spent time in the Amazon recording and observing different species while writing, and in "Letter to Henslow", one of the album's most supremely batshit moments, Dreijer and his sister whoop and ululate alongside actual field recordings of Amazonian birds. Dreijer's field research also turns up in his synth tones through the album, like the chittering, insectoid buzzing at the edges of "Variation of Birds".
Karin and Olof find all kinds of neat little ways to echo the unfolding drama as Darwin's observations move from geology and biology toward a unifying theory of all life. In "Geology" and "Minerals", mezzo-soprano Kristina Wahlin Momme delivers her lines in bursts of hurried singspiel as massive sheets of industrial noise grind and shudder beneath her, suggesting the shifting of the Earth's core. The disarmingly gorgeous "Ebb Tide Explorer" is a fragile collection of wisps and swells, Swedish singer/songwriter Jonathan Johansson singing in lilting two-note phrases that mimick the lazily swaying action of the seaweed he is describing.
As the story moves from Darwin's theories of all life into the details of his personal life, the relentless ominousness of the music finally lifts, and the album enters its most inviting stretch. "Annie's Box" is a spare, plangent ode to Darwin's daughter Annie, who died when she was only 10 years old. With its yawning open spaces, haunted by a single, mournful viola drone, it recalls the icy beauty of Nico's Marble Index. That's mere prologue for the one-two climax: "The Colouring of Pigeons" and "Seeds", 20 minutes of tingly alchemy that feel like the lightning-flash realization that the entire work has been struggling toward.
Anchored by a groaning cello and a rolling tribal beat, "The Colouring of Pigeons" unfolds in graceful layers, all in service to an aching, upward-arcing melody shared by Olof, Karin, and Momme. "Seeds" surges forward on a light four-on-the-floor pulse, surrounded a prismatic light show of bell sounds and a rubbery synth not far from current dubstep. At long last, it's a floor filler of sorts-- albeit one with harmonized mezzo-soprano overdubs and lyrics like, "Transoceanic pods and capsules/ Will old occupants allow for room and sustenance?"
The uninterrupted stretch of "Pigeons" into "Seeds" is the only moment on Tomorrow, in a Year where this is recognizably the work of the Knife, and not coincidentally it's the most thrilling and vital music on the record. Reconciling their boundless ambitions with their crowd-pleasing instincts, they hit upon a sweet spot that only Laurie Anderson and few others have managed to locate-- a clearing where pop and the avant-garde meet and make each other freshly strange and inviting. Who knows what kind of reception this will receive; if it's any kind of prologue to an epiphany that allows whole albums of music as inspired as "Pigeons" and "Seeds", however, maybe we'll look back at it in five years as the moment the Knife first went next level.
