Ten Days Of Perfect Tunes

The Knife “Heartbeats”

In my mind this song is essential to the story of Fluxblog, and perhaps the finest example of the international pop underground I was focused on for the first six years of the site’s existence. But I’ve never really written about it. I featured it in a post with two other tracks in April 2003, but that was back when the emphasis of the site was on sharing music more than writing about it. I didn’t figure that out for a little while. I wasn’t fully prepared to reckon with anything this deep when I was just 22, so I’m going to try to give it a go today.

“Heartbeats” has proven to be quite good in very different arrangements, but the Deep Cuts arrangement will always be my favorite. The delicacy of The Knife’s live arrangement or José González’s acoustic version is lovely, but a lot of the magic of the song for me is in the slightly awkward weight of that big chunky synth riff and in the way the keyboard accents seem to sparkle garishly in the background. The beauty of the song is in the way Karin Dreijer’s vocal melody soars gracefully in contrast with a track that’s a bit tacky and off-balance. It’s a song about falling in love, and awkwardness and corniness is part of that.

Dreijer’s lyrics are as evocative as the sound of the piece, alternating between obvious romanticism (“one night of magic rush, the start: a simple touch”) and more oblique poetry (“you kept us awake with wolves’ teeth,” “mind is a razor blade”). The tense shifts around, starting off in an uncertain present – “one night to be confused, one night to speed up truth” – but most of it is sung in the past tense. It’s hard to tell whether this is meant to be taken as nostalgia for a love that has since ended, or just the early days of something ongoing. But it doesn’t really matter because either way it’s about a special moment in time that’s behind them regardless of how things turned out.

Buy it from Amazon.