A Red Carnation

The Knife “Wrap Your Arms Around Me”

“Wrap Your Arms Around Me” is one of the most unsettling songs about romance and lust I’ve ever heard, partly because its sound implies being crushed by an enormous weight, and mostly because the singer’s urge for affection is reduced to biological imperatives and social status. There is nothing idealistic here, nothing lofty or emotional, nothing we’d recognize from how pop culture frames any of this. Instead, we have Karin Dreijer Andersson’s raw voice singing dryly about “the urge for penetration,” and making the common hope of “feel love and build a house with you” seem completely detached, like a set of computer commands. The line that really gives me shivers is the repeated lyric “free the unborn child at the castle,” which…I’m not sure if I really need to explain why that sounds so disturbing, right? It is precisely where this song tips from an uncomfortably bleak vision of sex to a nightmare about procreation.

FYI, I wrote a big thing about The Knife’s new album over here.

Buy it from Amazon.