You Give Me Fever!

Who is Fever Ray? What is his/her claim to fame? And why should we, discerning listeners, care? To answer the first question- Karin Dreijer Andersson. To answer the second- she's one half of Swedish group, The Knife. To answer the latter: please read below.
Listing such disparate elements as David Lynch, Doom, and Donnie Darko as inspiration, The Knife was formed silently in 1999. Releasing their self-titled debut in 2001, they didn't attract much attention till 2003 and the release of their sophomore project, Deep Cuts, and namely single, "Heartbeats". Garnering note-worthy reviews from Pitchforkmedia and other such uber-cool indie publications, the duo was praised for its vocal experimentation, and Bjork-esque attention to synths. But it wasn't until 2006 that the band really broke out. With the release of Silent Shout, Pitchfork again showered the duo with great praises, awarding it "Best New Music" status in February, before naming it Album of the Year in December of that year. Against such a rich background of accomplishments and acclaim, Karin releases her highly anticipated debut album, named Best New Music by Pitchfork for the month of March. When news broke of the record in October, one would have been forgiven for wondering if the duo hadn't secretly made good on their threats to call it quits. After listening to the album, it still isn't sure, as Andersson gives no clues here, and that's exactly the point.
Album-opener and lead single, "If I Had a Heart", seems like a straight-forward pop song about romantic longing. "If I had a heart I could love you / If I had a voice I would sing / After the night when I wake up / I'll see what tomorrow brings", Dreijer Andersson sings, but what gives the songs its depth and complexity is the way her vocal is pushed into a grim baritone range that works with the equally distorted, bottomed-out melodic line that turns the song's refrain into a fascinating bit of self-reflection. From its opening notes, the album proves that Andersson and her producers (Christopher Berg, who has mixed much of the Knife's output, and the duo Van Rivers & the Subliminal Kid) understand how to use these choices to define a distinct, purposeful aesthetic, rather than simply use them as gimmicks.
Sounding like a lost track from Silent Shout, current single, "When I Grow Up" is simply gorgeous. The song’s oddly sensual interplay between its guitar-and-keyboard melody and the compellingly off-kilter beat are matched to lyrics that not only reimagine youthful ambitions but also take us somewhere rather disturbing: “I put my soul in what I do / Last night I drew a funny man with dark eyes and a hanging tongue / It goes way back.”
One of Fever Ray's most remarkable aspects comes from how Dreijer Andersson funnels little moments of humor, banality, remembrance, mania, and anxiety through her deadpan affect to create a central character worthy of any psychological horror. You might even reasonably suggest this record is about psychosis. In "Seven", she tells the story of "a friend who I've known since I was seven/ We used to talk on the phone/ If we have time/ If it's the right time." Backdropped by pattering drums and faintly tropical synths, the album maintains an air of childlike unreality, vaguely monstrous desire and hidden knowledge, all themes and templates pitched to perfection by The Knife.
The foreboding tropicalia continues with next track, "Triangle Walks", and five songs in Dreijer Andersson has not mis-stepped once, a rare feat in these iPod-shuffle times. "Concrete Walls" shifts things up a bit with a dark and moody, back beat that sounds almost melted, and vocals that are so distorted, not one word being sung is heard. This being Dreijer Andersson, that's beside the point- it isn't so much what is being sung, but how everything feels. The record provides enough lyrical insight, but definitive meanings are always left blurry, vague and amorphous enough to keep you guessing. "Now's The Only Time I Know" makes for a great song title, and to be honest, it's the album's first dull track. Please note, this is a dullness that would sound rather ground-breaking if artistes half Dreijer Andersson's talent approached. Still, the song sounds too same-y in comparison to what has gone before it, not necessarily adding anything to the album's aesthetics.
The title of next track, "I'm Not Done" is a bit ironic, considering the track before it, as maybe we start to question if she has run out of ideas, while "Keep the Streets Empty For Me" answers with a resounding 'no'.
Almost introducing each sound indivdually as the song progresses, the track is a duet with Swedish pop singer Cecilia Nordlund of Cilihili, and explores an even deeper escape route from the adult world by entering the refuge of zoomorphism, a surreal state of wanting to return to an idealised natural world by becoming an animal. “I learned not to eat the snow/My fur is hot, my tongue is cold/On a bed of spider web/I think about to change myself”, the pair sing. It’s some kind of sweet-and-innocent version of lycanthropy; the narrator turning into a cuddly soft toy rather than say, a blood-crazed werewolf. What makes the track awesome isn't exactly evident, maybe it's the bamboo flute that flutters through-out, maybe it's the track's minimalistic edge, but that in itself is indicative of the rest of the album; in addition to many of the same plasticky percussions and goofy synth sounds that the Knife made their stock-in-trade, Fever Ray also brims with fragile, more finely articulated sounds. Spread over 10 tracks and near 50 minutes, the way Karin draws out each word in a catlike manner could have begun to grate. But that potential pitfall is nicely sidestepped though liberal use of the vocoder, stretching her vocals to eerie and equally playful depths.
But, the album doesn't end there, dear reader, oh no. It ends with quite possibly the album's best track, "Coconut". At 7 minutes long, the song rumbles on a pattern of synths and staccato drums before a ceremonious wall of voices arrive at the midpoint to march it to a close. Except, "close" implies it was written; the more time you spend with Fever Ray, the more you become convinced that these songs aren't written so much as they're temporarily let out.
Thematically, and for the quality of songwriting, Fever Ray fully deserves to be considered a follow-up to Silent Shout; nonetheless, it’s also a line-in-the-sand for The Knife-as-pop-entity, a Kid A-like demand to be respected on the artist’s own terms, or left alone. You can’t dance to any of it, whatever the remixers may do, but you can certainly inhabit it. Instead, the focus here is on Andersson's oblique narratives and the startling, stark electronic distortions she uses on her vocal tracks. These dramatic, often inhuman-sounding shifts in range only heighten the palpable sense of dread on the Knife's macabre songs, but here the same production trick serves a different but no less effective purpose: to draw attention to the minimalism and surprising pop bent of the songs. Sure, there's nothing on here as immediate as "We Share Our Mother's Health" or "Marble House", instead, she's recorded something far denser and more challenging; an unshakeable and unforgettable album.