You Were An Ancient Flower

The Knife featuring Lærke Winther “The Height of Summer”

The Knife’s Tomorrow, In A Year is a difficult album in several ways. It is an opera about the life and work of Charles Darwin, which would be enough to make it a challenging experience for many listeners, but on top of that, it’s a rather distinct and atypical opera incorporating several abstract sequences and elements of dance music. Its most bizarre moments are often brilliant and evocative, but are not “listenable” in the way most people engage with music, and demand a very high level of attention, investment, and benefit of the doubt. In addition to all that, the advance mp3 for the album, “The Colouring of Pigeons”, was so impossibly brilliant that it was almost inevitable for me to feel let down by the full opera. I had expected an entire record on that wavelength, what I got was a lot more impressionistic and scattered. This isn’t a huge problem, though — I accept and appreciate Tomorrow, In A Year for what it is. It’s a bold, original work that does its own thing, and I have faith that it’s more impressive when actually staged as an opera rather than as a studio recording.

“The Height of Summer” is the final song on Tomorrow, In A Year, and it serves as something of a narrative coda. It is not an opera song or some impressionistic composition, but instead a pop ballad very much along the lines of what is typically expected of the Knife. It’s a strange, beautiful piece of music that has an unlikely yet graceful balance of flutter and bounce. The tone is wistful and nostalgic; it is essentially a piece of correspondence set to song. Lærke Winther’s voice is cool and understated, but she comes across as thoughtful and imaginative, like a person who spends a great deal of time in her head, but is making the effort to check in on the outside world. Darwin the man may be a distant, fond memory for her, but his ideas still resonate for her in the seemingly minor details of life, and in how she imagines a world without her.

Buy it from Amazon.