That the Knife's 2006 breakthrough Silent Shout didn't set the dominoes on a series of similarly grotesque and unnatural sounding imitators is less an indictment on its impact than a comment on its inimitability. The current apex of ten years' collaboration between siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, it's one of a handful of albums from the past decade that one might argue sounded like nothing before it. In the three years since, the Dreijers have treaded lightly, touring and remixing in carefully managed bursts before quietly receding back into silence altogether.
When news of a Dreijer Andersson solo project called Fever Ray broke in October, one would have been forgiven for wondering if the duo hadn't secretly made good on their threats to call it quits. God knows, they still might. The point is, you'll get no clues here: although every bit as alluring, this debut has as much in conflict as it has in common with Silent Shout. The sounds often square, but the ferociousness has been subsumed by a slow drip of anxiety and dread. The macabre nursery rhymes have given way to lyrics that imply a sort of domestic cabin fever. It's still of the same creator, just not from the same swamp.
Things move slowly here; they slither instead of stomp. The house-inflected, booming low end of Silent Shout has been scrubbed away, leaving Karin's voice naked and upfront, anchoring the songs in a way it hasn't previously been required to. Although no less inscrutable, her lyrics adjust. Where those on Silent Shout had a witchy scale and ambition appropriate to the hugeness of the songs, Fever Ray's words feel so interior as to seem slightly unhinged. Indeed, 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. "I've got 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," she declares conspiratorially, amidst pattering drums and faintly tropical synths in "Seven". In the morose, slumbering "Concrete Walls", she slows her voice to a pained yawn, which repeats the final couplet to a resigned fade: "I live between concrete walls/ In my arms she was so warm/ Oh how I try/ I leave the TV on/ And the radio."
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, such as the delicate mallet instruments that punctuate "Now's The Only Time I Know", the bamboo flute that wanders through "Keep the Streets Empty For Me", and the grinding guitar sound in "I'm Not Done". The album moves at roughly the same pace and with the same general tone, rendering some of the songs indistinguishable at first, but committed listens will reveal this to be as nuanced and as rich of a production as anything either Dreijer has done.
The highlights are many. Opener "If I Had a Heart" is a shivering, timely meditation on greed, immorality, and lust for power that dovetails nicely with AIG and Madoff ("This will never end cause I want more/ More, give me more, give me more"); "I'm Not Done" is a pressurized squall that culminates with Karin dueting with a helium-voiced version of herself; while seven-minute closer "Coconut" 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. They're too starved, too eerie, and too transfigured to have been anything but.
