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.”
From their studio a pastoral 18th-century water tower, they conducted their research. Between self-restraint and purity lies transcendence. Says Dan, “We were very hard on ourselves. Once something became too convoluted, we would chop it down with an ax. We wanted a very epic album, with elements of heroism, comedy and manga. An album with superheroes. It wasn t about sounding contemplative or naturalistic. I have never been so affected by synthetic sounds in the middle of those fields.”
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