Thousand Yellow Cocoons, Under Over Through: A Review of The Knife's 'Tomorrow in a Year'

Evolvaphone fans get ready-- this is required listening for the musical evolutionist. Here's the pitch:

An opera singer, a pop-singer and an actress sing an electro-opera about Darwin.  Samples recorded in Iceland and the Amazon.  Oh, and there's a bit with an orchestra being dragged through water to get that certain something.

'Tomorrow In A Year' might initially be off-putting with its dissonant drones and ambient syncopated chirps.  I should say, this is not background music to put on over dinner.  But if you close your eyes and put on the headphones, you begin to hear crickets and tree frogs in the opera singer's voice on 'Letter To Henslow'. On 'Geology', overdriven speakers sound like terrifying, lumbering vocalisations of crushing glaciers.

Like 'On Origin of Species', the most fascinating parts of 'Tomorrow In A Year' are left to the birds. 'Colouring of Pigeons' steals the show, and slowly evolves in such a way that it seems to be not one, but many songs at once sung by many singers.  But the pulsating beat presses on, while instruments and singers wax and wane, and others take their place, ultimately taking the melody in different directions most beautiful and most wonderful.

The album mixes speculation on Darwin's  personal life ('Annie's Box' being about the death of his daughter) with lyrics taken nearly verbatim from his works. Compare:

Lyrics on 'Variations Of Birds'

So there are three sorts of birds which use their wings/ for more purposes than flying/ The steamer as paddles the penguin as fins
and the ostrich spreads its plumes like sails to the breeze.

Excerpt from March 19th entry, chapter 9 of The Voyage of the Beagle.

Thus we find in South America three birds which use their wings for other purposes besides flight; the penguins as fins the steamer as paddles, and the ostrich as sails.

Pitchfork wasn't too impressed by the album, saying "prominent electro group releases berserk and impenetrable avant-garde opera; blank stares ensue... Here nothing even remotely approaching a steady beat shows up for more than half its length."

Steady beat... no.  But listening to violins, crickets, synthesizers and timpani play Darwin?  I'll take it.

Available online for purchase, the entire album is currently available streaming at Stereogum.

"‘Tomorrow, In A Year’ is a unique musical project. Richard Dawkins’s gene trees have formed the basis of some of the musical composition, artificial sounds have been mixed with field recordings, with the music inspired by everything from the different stages of a bird learning its melody, to a song based on Darwin’s loving letters about his daughter Anne. These are compositions that challenge the conventional conception of opera music." (more from The Knife and Hotel Pro Forma)