Pitchfork

In promotional photos, the Dreijer siblings appear in comically oversized crow's masks; when performing live, they obscure the stage with a gauzy mesh overhang and peer out impassively from behind bodysuits and balaclavas; on record, they delight in vocal distortions, each one emanating some inhuman grotesquerie. Theatre is the Knife's lifeblood. It's incorporated so completely and convincingly into their persona that, much like Pitchfork's Amanda Petrusich's conviction that Tom Waits "exists in a world populated only by freight trains and barmaids, rodeo clowns and shortwave radios," it's next to impossible to reconcile Karin and Olof with the banalities of day-to-day life.

That desire to transcend the mundane drives lots of art, but despite that they've been making music for the better part of the decade, it didn't really crystallize for The Knife until earlier this year. That moment came, of course, with the release of their third album, Silent Shout. More than just a great pop album, the record boasted a truck of exotic characters, textures, and ideas. In the sense that it etched out a world with a strange but identifiable internal logic, it felt a little bit like a fantasy writer's breakthrough novel, except with the Dreijers playacting their way through every goblin, ghost, and spook.

Not surprisingly, the relative success of Silent Shout has paved the way for a re-examination of the band's first two albums. Issued in America for the first time courtesy of Mute Records, neither 2001's eponymous debut nor 2004's Deep Cuts approach the feral highs of Silent Shout; but, taken in a lump, this streaky collection of buoyant pop, creepy denouements, ill-advised genre exercises, and flashes of brilliance spell out the Knife's journey from a sprightly, steel drum sampling, electropop outfit to something much darker and more refined.

Stacked side-by-side-by-side, the Knife's discography is pretty much a textbook example of increasing returns, which means 2001's The Knife is the weakest link in the chain. With the exception of the sproingy "Kino", the nasty guitar squalls of "I Take Time" and the retooled Celtic folkisms of "Parade" (all of which are great), everything else here feels a little limp and unsure; latter-half tracks like "Bird" and "A Lung" practically crumble to an end. Nonetheless, between Dreijer's voice (a thing of strange beauty, even in untouched form), the mutated vocals in "A Lung", and the gently percolating synths of opener "Neon", there are plenty of moments to suggest the Knife's future greatness.

Brandishing a bona fide calling card single (the superb "Heartbeats"), a toothier production approach, and an increasing debt to house music, 2004's Deep Cuts marked a double-step forward for the duo. If The Knife suffered from seeming a little too tentative and domesticized, Deep Cuts came across as brash and untamed, a streamroller that left overturned chunks of everything from steel drums ("Pass This On") and marimbas ("Rock Classics") to hi-NRG ("Listen Now") and slinky, Timbaland-inspired r&b ("You Make Me Like Charity") in its path. It wasn't always pretty, but the highs-- "Heartbeats", "One For You", "She's Having a Baby", "You Take My Breath Away"-- were more rewarding, and the sense of drama noticeably heightened.

Where The Knife comes reissued as-is, without extras, Deep Cuts arrives packaged with six bonus tracks and an additional DVD of videos. Between standout Deep Cuts-era remixes from Dahlback & Dahlback, Rex the Dog, and Mylo-- the likes of which would become standard practice for Silent Shout's singles-- and a DVD showing signs of the band's increasing attention to their visual aspect, the bulk of these bonuses have the effect of further bridging the gap between records two and three. Of course, whether you actually want to peek at the duo fumbling behind the curtain in the years before they hit their stride is another question altogether; at the least, any grousing over the unavailability of these records can end now.