No. 100: The Knife - Pass This On (2003)

I’m counting down my Top 100 Songs of All Time. To keep this from becoming a Bob Dylan / Tom Waits love-in, only one track per artist is allowed. Feel free to leave your comments below.

Go to No. 99

Over the past decade Swedish brother and sister duo Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer have created some of the most interesting electronic music going.

As The Knife they released four albums, including the critically acclaimed Silent Shout and a soundtrack to the film Hannah med H, before teaming up with performance artists and opera singers for Tomorrow, In a Year—a stunning electronic opera based on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.

In between, Andersson released an album as Fever Ray—overall, a better record than anything by The Knife—while Dreijer records epic minimal dance tracks as Oni Ayhun.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with any of these records, you might know Heartbeats—a song from The Knife’s second album Deep Cuts—which was covered by Jose Gonzalez and featured in a Sony Bravia ad. (By the way, that anodyne acoustic version is not a patch on the original’s buzzing beauty).

But for no. 100 in this list of my Top 100 Songs of All Time, I’m going back to the first song I ever heard by The Knife: Pass This On. Another track from Deep Cuts, the song immediately grabs you with a completely unexpected kettle drum hook.

This sunny island sound feels remarkably out of place alongside the downtempo electronic beat, but you are quickly hypnotized by its sad beauty.

Andersson’s vocal is a second head-turner. She has a heavily accented deadpan delivery that is reminiscent of The Velvet Underground collaborator Nico, though far more sinister. Lyrically it’s almost in the realm of Jarvis Cocker, with nicely observed lines about someone admitting: “I’m in love with your brother”. But when Andersson finally adds: “I thought I’d come by”, it gets genuinely creepy.

And still we haven’t reached the best bit of the song—the epically eerie chorus where Andersson affects a fantastic falsetto and sings “He wasn’t really looking for some more than / some company on the dancefloor”.

It’s both weird and banal at the same time and suddenly you realize that what you presumed was a piece of atmospheric electronica is actually earworm calypso pop of the highest order. Pass it on.

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