The Knife’s tour behind last year's Shaking the Habitual was, depending on who you ask, one of two things: that Emma Goldman quote about dance and revolution put into radical, sweat-all-night action and tricked out with top-notch lights and choreography, or a canned and confusing mess of lip-synching and interpretive dance, an expression of social justice as told by the cast of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. This probably had as much to do with your stance on Shaking the Habitual as your spot in the crowd, because from Silent Shout on, the Knife have commanded a massive fanbase who have been waiting almost a decade to finally see them live. Shaken-Up Versions, an album of the remixes taken from the tour's setlist, makes a serviceable substitute for the live experience, and it's also a fine snapshot of where the Knife’s music is at right now: often challenging, at times a little frustrating, but at its core a thrilling body of work.
Like most live albums, the material captured on Shaken-Up Versions loses something when taken offstage, since choreography and charged atmosphere is lost in the transition from arena to wax. Fortunately, these remixes don’t need context. Shaking the Habitual, like the theoretical texts it cites, often seems like it’s been praised and referenced more than listened to in full, so it would have been easy for the Knife to aim for easy accessibility—but the reworks rarely smack of obviousness. On record, “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” possessed one of the stronger hooks on Shaking the Habitual—a quietly nagging synth line, percussion like rattling speakers, gonzo humor, and the rallying cry: “What if we can’t make it/ But we say that we can?”—but the Shaken-Up version takes things in a more challenging direction by puréeing the hooks and pushing the dissonant flutes and vox up front. Without a live crowd to prompt you, the remix is paradoxically easier to be studied than danced to, but it’s the Knife, so the polyrhythms and layers give you lots to work with.
The remixes collected on Shaken-Up Versions aren't quite inaccessible, though. The rework of “We Share Our Mother’s Health” takes on a handclap-buoyed, infectious shuffle, with synths like airhorns, vocals pitched forward, and everything engineered to get butts out of seats. Silent Shout's disturbing title track is transformed into a seven-minute breakdown that shudders with an even more anxious energy, Karin’s new vocal frayed and tentative in place of the original's gravitas. The two deepest cuts are the most excitingly recontextualized, both in terms of the Knife’s current sound and general outlook. “Got 2 Let U”, from 2003's Deep Cuts, loses its strident oboe sample and gains a tempo injection—think 2010's Tomorrow, in a Year as UK garage—while lo-fi synth fairytale “Bird”, from the band’s self-titled 2001 debut, practically jitters here, with lines like “But you wanted me to be a girl/ Without feathers, without urge” taking on extra symbolic meaning when paired with Shaking the Habitual’s message.
Shaken-Up Versions truncates the Shaking the Habitual setlist, so for those familiar with the stage show, the omissions are inevitable. and here they’re both obvious (Jess Arndt’s galvanizing spoken-word “The Body Possum” that appeared in the middle of the show), and puzzling (Silent Shout cut “One Hit”, a creepy track that would have nice company here). Yet, it’s a credit to the Knife’s craft that Shaken-Up Versions regardless feels like a complete statement; there’s a logic to the sequencing (Silent Shout’s singles bookend the album, while Shaking the Habitual’s statements of purpose make up the deeper cuts) and a throughline to the remixing choices that make it work on its own.
Shaken-Up Versions doesn’t threaten replace anything in the Knife’s catalog, but it does highlight the levity that’s always been present in their music—yes, even on self-consciously, unsubtly Important Albums like Shaking the Habitual. The centerpiece of both that record and this new one is one line: “Ready to lose the privilege.” To do that, it helps to lose your inhibitions, and you just might need a good beat, too.
