Description
Powerful, intense, coherent. “Shake, Shook, Shaken” is the very special odyssey of The Dø. Olivia Merilahti and Dan Levy always favored risk-taking rather than comfort and compromise. With this third album, the Franco-Finnish duo offers a radical change – a futuristic turn carried along by a syncopated electronic beat. After the wonderfully accidental “A Mouthful” (2008) and the organically experimental “Both Ways Open Jaws” (2011), “Shake, Shook, Shaken” responds with a new requirement elevated as “dogma” in the opinion of those concerned: Dan and Olivia deliberately opted out of acoustic instruments to focus on synthetic dance sounds and percussion. “When we started writing these songs,” they said, “we used only a laptop and a keyboard. We quickly became obsessed with this set-up; this form of minimalism banning ‘real’ instruments to the point of creating a new work ethic: guitars, which had been almost over-used previously, have intentionally been set aside. Our aim with ‘Shake, Shook, Shaken’ was to take ownership of the sounds that had previously been undervalued, while going with a more pop aesthetic.”
