| Dear readers, if I may be so bold as to speak openly,
I must tell you that I cannot stand it. Listening to “Knives
Out” is a frankly painful experience. By setting us down in a
present tense loaded with immanent squalor and pressing hard decisions
between various options which are all entirely distasteful, it places
us in an uncomfortable situation. It rubs in the icky details of our
surroundings and takes an unseemly delight in doing so. It has to
it a skeletal beauty, and Yorke’s singing, as it will continue
to do until the album’s end, is practically a treatise on the
very subject of beauty; but its heart is a cold and horrible thing,
and it wants to share its horridness with us. That is really all there
is to it. The phrases that could be taken two or three ways can only
really be taken one way: as open attacks on whomever’s being
addressed. Its guitars help the singer to convince his target that
there’s some ambiguity here -- the music only takes on its menacing
tone in light of the lyrics which have been set to it -- when they
know, as the drummer knows, as the preceding song knew and as the
next one knows even better, that there is nothing ambiguous about
the singer’s position. He hates us. He has constructed labyrinths
for us from which there is no escape and in which he hopes that we
will starve to death. His seething is a hard thing to hear. If you
miss the fury that underlies “Knives Out”’s languid,
pretty rhythms, then Amnesiac itself will remain a mystery.
But if we locate what’s waiting for us here, then all is revealed:
the singer who said he “might be wrong” didn’t mean
it; the death-obsessed narrator of “Pyramid Song” is less
romantic when there are other people involved; the narrators we can’t
find are people we’d do better to avoid, and the ones we do find
mean us harm. |
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