Sunday, April 12, 2009

Fever Ray - Album Review

Written for 'Sup Magazine


You enter a forest. It's dusk, and tall, dark trees loom over your head under a clear sky, their heartbeats clearly audible in your dreamlike state. Suddenly you hear a male voice that leads you slowly towards a clearing. You are now in the realms of the otherworldly. And then, in the middle of the clearing like an elfic princess, is Karin Dreijer Andersson. One half of the super-successful Swedish duo the Knife, the mysterious ice queen has worked her magic once again as Fever Ray, title of both project and album. Now I'm not going to say you won't find similarities between old and new (particularly in "Seven") – the voice, instantly recognizable, is there, as are the electronic sounds and the overall cryptic je-ne-sais-quoi.

But where the Knife's Silent Shout was the perfect avant-garde soundtrack to the pill-popping, new ravey 2006, Fever Ray is a more sombre and mellowed-out affair, on cue with (uh-oh, here I go) these modern times of economic recession and worldwide paranoia, when we might need stimuli of a different, more introspective kind. Think of it like an upper and a downer. The highest moment of climax comes right before the fall, and if we had new rave and 'blog-house' just a little while ago, now it's all about post-punk, back-to-the-roots lo-fi and lots of conceptual, atmospheric 'layerisms'. And this is where Fever Ray slots in - an album that transports you to its own mysterious dimension and on repeated listens lets you have a dig around.

Hence our Nordic forest. Opening track "If I Had a Heart" is its ancient gate, allowing you in to 48 minutes of exploration through its queen's subconscious and your own. In this forest there are memories of retro-futuristic landscapes, organic sounds flying around like birds, tribal drumbeats echoing in the air... and that booming male voice ("Concrete Walls/Dry and Dusty"), which turns out it’s also her through a voice transformer. There are some upbeat moments too, mind – "Triangle Walks", while not being what you’d call a 'party banger' (none of that in this record), could be like finding a Kyoto garden in bloom in the middle of the forest. Going from the cryptic to the most personal, her lyrics range from minimalistic mantras to her thoughts on motherhood or retirement: "...There’s nothing to be afraid of / ...I’m not done" ("I’m Not Done").

Suitably, "Coconut" is a fully atmospheric last track that slowly shows us the way out. Almost solely instrumental (bar the minute and a half or so of quasi-ceremonial vocals), it gradually builds up over a Blade Runner-esque synth base, taking us further inside our mind trip before fading out and leaving us with all this information and no real grasp of what the hell just happened. Or maybe it’s just me; despite my numerous attempts at coming up with a more rationalistic approach to describing this record, all my mind could do was drift back to that imaginary forest of mine, a metaphor to replace the words I couldn’t find for Fever Ray's self-titled album. This is a piece of work that invites you to daydream, to find inner worlds while listening and to make your own dark forest up.
Fever Ray's self-titled debut will be released March 24th, 2009 on Mute Records in the US.

2 comments:

Mil said...

buenisimo el albul solista de la Knife ...
Saludos .

Jorge Romero-Habeych said...

wonderful piece of writing.....now i just have to get a copy of the album!