ALBUMS // Knot – Knot
Post by Tommy
When their band Krill called it quits in 2016, Ian Becker, Jonah Furman, and Aaron Ratoff cited frustrations with the limitations of indie rock, and its impulse towards radical emotion and aesthetic, to actually inspire radical change in the world. What ended up being their final full length release, the previous year’s A Distant Fist Unclenching, had been a fitful chronicle of internal turmoil and allergy-as-metaphor in which a series of encounters with everyday objects triggered internal conflict, and existential spirals tangling up in huge, equivocal questions about morality and responsibility. After the split, Becker moved to Texas to work in public housing, while Furman joined the labor movement and Ratoff studied civil rights law.
Reuniting four politically tumultuous years later as 3/4 of Knot, the members of Krill take another stab at infusing radical politics in indie rock on their self titled debut, released Friday on Exploding In Sound. Personnel changes weigh softly on Knot – singer Jonah Furman switches from bass to guitar, while Krill’s guitarist Aaron Ratoff takes over on the low end. The addition of a second guitar, played by fellow labor activist Joseph Damanuelle-Hall, helps the band trade in toothy riffs for more cooperative, mellifluous phrases which nonetheless tend to tie themselves up in the end.
On the whole, though, the name might be a misnomer for a band that’s working harder than ever to untangle. Lead single “Foam,” for example, begins in a familiar jittery haze, immobilized in bed and powerless against the “jaundiced eye” of the morning, as the narrator’s brother sends videos of quivering sea foam from the beach. A bizarre intrusive thought: “Who put these sand dunes here,” Furman growls, “and for whom?” It’s a trick question (sand dunes, it turns out, are formed at random, and for no one in particular) which, gnawing at the existential, might have become the feverish and cyclical refrain in a Krill song. But Knot, avoiding the trap, focuses on a simpler resolution: “I should have come and met you on the beach.” It evokes a familiar self loathing as the music bubbles and froths, but lyrically it shows a soft maturity and responsibility that illuminates the new album, and new band’s growth, away from probing big questions and towards making some attempt to respond.
Knot, of course, still has an underlying depressive streak; the band is still nervous, jumpy and frantic, but the album indulges in (and encourages) an impulse to sublimate those feelings into the fight for something better. The antagonist here is no longer the cruel whim of the world, but rather the man made systems and beliefs on it that exclude or oppress people to the point that no one could really blame them for considering the world to be callous and indifferent. In many cases, the world itself is suffering under these systems, whether in their contributions to the destruction of the ozone layer or in their refusal to legislate regulations against those contributions. “Maybe something bad will happen, / or maybe something good will happen” Furman proposes on “The World,” clear-eyed and committed. “Whatever it is, / I’ll stick to it and own it. / I don’t want another world — I want this one.”
Proposing solidarity and organization as a means of fighting back against these systems, the band interrogates different ways that doubt and distrust divide us against each other and keep us from seizing collective power. “I Live In Fear” explores characters whose fear and distrust, paired with a dose of privilege and a lack of empathy, feeds an impulse towards senseless violence. Album standout “Justice” proposes that a fear of power and a fear of justice and a view of either as violent, scary means is a convenient tool to discourage us from organizing and seizing either, and therefore keeping us vulnerable to the abuse of both. Neither justice nor power is so monolithic, they argue, to be immovable by reform and reclamation – but that also bears a responsibility to make those reforms comprehensive and intersectional.
That’s largely the way radical instinct takes root in Knot, in its belief that not only are better things possible, but that we can get them by committing ourselves to others’ exclusive needs for justice alongside our own. It’s hard not to hear this communal spirit in the music too – without sacrificing their proclivity towards winding atonal and asymmetrical figures, the arrangements are incredibly well-puzzled and copacetic. The drums, as nimble and antsy as drummer Ian Becker’s best work in Krill, are more precise and attentive to lyrical phrasing, listening and following rhythmic shifts as often as they lead them. The guitar work often organizes itself into motifs and composed themes in conversation with the vocal while the bass work is adventurous and insistent, reharmonizing chords in some moments while in others exploring its own motifs and conversations in others. No one instrument carries the means to reproduce the song, even as each member turns in their most impressive performance. Everything is fluid, cooperative, and refreshingly harmonious.
While posing questions that point towards larger radical causes, the album’s calls for community organizing are often small scale and personal, playing to the strengths of the band’s catalog and the limitations of the form. In “Orange,” two characters whose wants and needs are incompatible nonetheless find a way to rely on one another when the narrator offers to peel an orange for them, care for their pets, watch their “secret plant,” in an intimate and practical attempt at building community together. In “Horse Trotting, The Feet Not Touching The Ground,” the band’s warmest composition soundtracks a memory seeking the open hands of family in museum, as the narrator resists the titular Degas sculpture (below) its attempt at trickery (“Can’t fool me, I see the pole holding the / Figurine up”).
None of this is to say that the album is lacking in wide existential questions. Album closer “Space and Time” poses the inscrutable provocation that “Space and time are each other’s punishment” then wonders if the fruits of revolution will always be out of sight. “Foam” flirts with the idea that “Maybe we are all just evil motherfuckers” and “Rust” finds its narrator in a similar setting, immobile in bed and rusty-souled, wondering if they “could be wrongly wired.” But the band tries its best to stave off the familiar spirals of doubt by offering concrete positions and calls to action, like this Seussian one (from “Space And Time”) – “if you want to be, you’re going to have to do. / And if you want to do a thing, you’ll have to be one too.” (“And all I have found is wanting,” Furman admits, maybe reminding us that no platitude can command a perfect commitment).
The point being – to self actualize is to do put in the work, and to put in the work is to self actualize, and to continue to work harder at being better about it, no matter whether the fruits of that labor, as the song worries, “might be beyond / the end.” Knot don’t deny that the unanswerable can be a terrifying and doubt-inspiring thing – but they do offer for maybe the first time a path out of that immobilizing fear of the world by reminding us that it’s still within our means to build and fortify kinder systems on top of, even in spite of it. The wind, after all, makes sand dunes for nobody – we’re the only ones who might ever bother to build something for anybody else.
Buy Knot here.