Redeye - Doin’ the truffle shuffle November 01 2006

I stopped having epiphanies years ago after the epiphany that they were just drugs talking. At first, I believed my attitude would improve, but then the music didn’t. “Progressive house.” A “peanut” is neither a pea nor a nut, if you get my meaning. And now it’s years later...

... and then it happens. I’m at the balcony bar of Eleven50 — just another antsy $20 held cocked and quivering with antici... pation — when a pitched and pinched voice cuts anxiously through my anxiety like, well, the Knife.

One of my favorite electronic acts since 2003’s Deep Cuts, the Knife is a Swedish brother-sister synth-pop duo with no business being played here. Above me is the lounge for VIPs, which I decide stands for Very Impressionable Prissies as a Catholic schoolgirl, a nurse and Rainbow Brite are simultaneously coaxed to di-splay their thong-hugged bits to the plebes below, their ass cheeks suctioned to the skybox glass. It’s undoubtedly not my imagination, as guys to both sides almost simultaneously needle my sides and nod upward; I have nothing in common with Borat #26 and a Day-Glo “pimp,” but poontang breeds solidarity. Still, it feels likes I’m disassociated — behind a screen watching someone else’s life stream as Quicktime at half-speed — because the Knife is too intimate, internalized for this Big Room set and sound.

“Down here, it’s our time,” says Sean Astin in Goonies. And, indeed, the Knife is comparable to Goonies the way the group’s 2006 full-length Silent Shout is the Goth electrohaus equivalent to an elaborate, 35mm pirate adventure alongside a well-meaning mutant. Like Goonies’ plethora of booby traps, Knife songs feature a share of nervy, knotty passages. But once unpacked, the Knife is as gratifying as finding a marble bag full of One-Eyed Willie’s “rich stuff.”

The song transitions out just as the bartender acknowledges my existence, and my lost innocence drowns again in vodka-Red Bull.

While the Knife may have opened the door to my imagination, my actual draw to Eleven50 this “Halloween” was at the front door. It was my friend Jackie V’s last night manning the register for Liquified after more than a decade. Seriously, she’s been taking your money and your crap since you was in short ... make that phat pants. And, dudes, you were never doing her a favor when you slipped her a chronic crumb that could barely get an ant high. She was never going to remember you — your visor’s not that distinctive. I’m sure she’ll miss the bean counting, and I’ll miss her, so here’s to you, JV, for toughing it out one last time on your tuffet.

RedEye celebrates going out and going off. Send comments to redeye@creativeloafing.com, but hand-scrawled hate mail is preferred.