Tomorrow, In A Year

By all means engage yourself in Tomorrow, In a Year, for the prize at the end is one of the essential experiences of the young year. Just understand the scope of the expedition you’re embarking upon before you go.

Tomorrow, In A Year provides a complex view of The Knife as unmatched in their daring, their music quite defying categorisation as one species or another.

Sure enough, complicated, esoteric and, yes, really quite bonkers, it turns out to be. By the same token, Tomorrow, In a Year is also a work of vaulting ambition whose ‘seriousness’ is written on its metaphorical sleeve and whose sense of gravity and ascetic rigour give Scott Walker’s Tilt or The Drift a run for their artily uncompromising money.

On Tomorrow, In A Year, The Knife have reinforced everything that makes them such a brilliant, endearing group. [Apr 2010, p.93]

Finely wrought themes aside (replete with a careful balance between Darwin the man and the grand ideas he unlocked), it flunks the cohesiveness test, libretto or no, destined to sit forlornly on the shelves of most of the people who sent it to the top 10 of the Billboard electronic list, unplayed and unloved.

It's not the easiest listening by any means, but how fitting that on an album that pays tribute to Darwin, The Knife unveils their most significant evolution yet.

A truly revolutionary piece of work, the album is also an awfully hard sell that begs for an "even for the Knife" qualifier.

After three albums of encroaching conceptuality and quality, they’re cutting back on their known strengths in order to give everything over to the concept and the creative challenges it brings, never quite abandoning the listener, but requiring an undue amount of effort.

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.

While Tomorrow, In A year is a work of staggering scope, it is, to be honest, extrememly difficult and by some standards, unlistenable "music." [Winter 2010, p.96]

All the different ways to think about Tomorrow, In a Year seem to have the opposite effect of the one that was intended. They constrict the listener’s imagination and don’t allow for any room to breathe.

The album is a sprawling, experimental work defined more by ambient synth hum and field-recording rustle than by melodic hooks or danceable grooves.

The concept was ambitious but, unfortunately, in releasing Tomorrow as an album, the team divorces the music from the stage and leaves the songs stranded in a mire of effects and noise.

Highly evolved it may be, but that doesn't make it any more listenable. [Apr 2010, p.112]