The Knife

“We Share Our Mother’s Health”
from the album Silent Shout
2006

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The beginning of this song is a beginning. Dormant strands of tweaked electronics slowly yawn to life, as if waiting to perform after the researchers have left the lab for the night. Quickly settling into a Caribbean-by-way-of-Wax Trax polyrhythm, it spawns male and female forms. The female begins singing, in a voice that’s at once young, of indescribable ethnicity (okay, they’re Swedish) and irresistably bratty. Halfway through, the male takes over, taking the song into new territory — a mutant Nordic thunder that sounds like fifty voices combined into one. When they combine forces in the third section, it’s majestic, but all too brief, hissing away into thin air, as if someone were coming.

Electronic and dance music has, because of its inherent allegiance to ever-advancing technology, split so many times, into so many forms and sub-forms over the past decade that I gave up on trying to keep track. Like hip-hop, the best writers and critics of electronic music are those who follow it exclusively, and simpletons like me need some reference point as a filter through which to appreciate it — and the looking-backward-to-go-forward approach always appeals to me. The fact that I’m far from an expert on the subject should serve as further evidence that Silent Shout has something special in its appeal — It drew me in with its distinctive (and deceptively complex) approach, and kept me listening in an attempt to parse its debt to prior forms (elsewhere on the record, the icy vocals of Cocteau Twins’ Elisabeth Fraser are referenced). With that in mind, “We Share Our Mother’s Health” is hands-down not only the best dance track, but also the best song I’ve heard yet this year.