The Knife in Munich

The Swedish band The Knife were all the rage a few years back. Their 2006 album Silent Shout was one of my favorites that year and received universal acclaim. That tour featured Venetian masks on stage, but such theatricals would prove to be nothing compared to their next effort.

The duo, siblings Karin and Olof Dreijer, come from my hometown Gothenburg and it feels kind of weird to travel all the way to Bavaria to see them live. But I was really curious on where they would go next, as the newly released album Shaking the Habitual was less accessible than their previous work. Karin has also been busy with her solo project Fever Ray, which was a solid experience live, so I suspected that the new tour show would be something extra. Unfortunately I was right.

We walked through the hot streets of Munich, which were filled with people since the Germans have a day off work today. On a small patio we found a cosy place where I tried the Baviarian speciality Leberkäse. It turned out to be anything but liver and cheese, but some sort of sausage of corned beef and other strange stuff. Together with mustard and Pretzel it was a complete meal.

Arriving at Muffathalle.

After a short walk along the waterfront we arrived at the venue Muffathalle. We sat down against the wall with a large Helles to wait for the performance. The warmup turned out to be American-Palestinian performance artist Tarek Halab, who did some kind of aerobics thing with the audience from the mixer table. Not impressed.

Waiting for the show to start.

The Knife arrived on stage together with a lot of people, wearing some sort of heavy robes in a dimmed light settings. Suddenly they all erupted into Bollywood dance! WTF?

All songs except two were from Shaking the Habitual and the live renditions were quite strange, but somehow I liked it despite all the over-the-top dancing. Last song was Silent Shout with thundering bass and cool backing lights (which reminded me of Fever Ray’s laser show at Arvika 2009).

We left the owen-like heat of Muffathalle and walked down the street. Suddenly all cars started to honk like crazy and people were shouting something. It turned out to be that Bayern München had just won a soccer game against Barcelona, which made every German in the city mad with joy. We just sighed and carried on.