Those who have been listening to Use Knife’s previous output may notice a sharpening of sound, and a hardening of attitudes on their new long player, État Coupable. The cover, a painting of a rippling black flag highlighted on a black background, often reflects the stifling and pugnacious feel of the music. The title – loosely translated as “guilty state” – only adds to a charged atmosphere that drifts through this record like the smell of cordite.
Using the warm humanity expressed in Saif Al-Qaissy’s vocals, and the electronic-and-sax bricolage created by Kwinten Mordijck and Stef Heeren, these seven mysterious dark-dance tracks record the tale of the individual, pitted against the blind forces of the state: an entity, certainly in the experiences of Al-Qaissy, that can be “silent as darkness, rigid as ice, insensible as bronze”. Many of us only experience the flipside (to continue the quote, lifted ever-so-slightly out of context, from Anthony Powell), the version “decked with an outer amiability”.
État Coupable starts as it means to go on. ‘Demain Sera Mieux’ (Tomorrow Will Be Better) is an infusion of programmed polyrhythms, hot jets of synth and Saif Al-Qaissy’s plaintive, pinched, musings. I suspect this track – the rhythms creating the feeling of a person stumbling along a rock-strewn road – is placed right at the beginning to throw the listener off beam; there are no easy rides here. This discombobulation returns with the aural jigsaw puzzle of ‘Freedom, Asshole’: a track that features the busy skin work of Nihiloxica’s Spooky-J.
Use Knife are rightly celebrated for their thumping amalgamations of dark folk, new beat and post-national sensibilities. We get all of this in spades. And you can enjoy a lot of this record on a purely ornamental level. ‘Iraqi Drum Set’ and ‘Kadhdhaab’ are meditative electronic work-outs that please and invigorate. ‘A Reckoning’, featuring Radwan Ghazi Moumneh from Jerusalem in My Heart on Rababah, is particularly moreish, and frustratingly short at two minutes. Yet the voices, especially on ‘Iraqi Drum Set’, ‘Che Maili Wali’ and ‘A Reckoning’, feel disassociated from the music at times. The atmosphere they invoke is incredibly reminiscent of some of the tracks on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. On both records, the message feels copy-pasted for effect, leaving the narrative as fragile and elusive – and as essential to grasp – as the thread in the minotaur’s lair.
Use Knife’s work, it seems, is to remind us that Max Weber’s idea of the state commanding a monopoly of violence is one that plays out daily on those who don’t fit, a notion that directly counter our fond imaginations of what liberal democracy is. As Heeren sings on the dizzying title track, if you just look, these matters are “out in the open”. État Coupable is heady, charged, sometimes fractious, but compelling stuff.
