10 tracks · 48 min
Fever Ray is the pseudonym of Karin Elisabeth Dreijer Andersson, one half of sibling electronica duo The Knife. Fever Ray is her first solo album while the Swedish pair take a break. It's filled with the same brooding, uncomfortable songs, delivered in swathes of sequencers and impenetrable lyrical concerns. And for fans of such Scandinavian weirdness, it's bloody marvellous. Playing with identity has long been a modus operandi for The Knife, refusing to appear without masks etc. Fever Ray continues this game while adding a layer of childish fantasy. On first single When I Grow Up she sings ''I want to be a forester, run through the moss on high heels''. It sounds cute, until you see the accompanying video of Dreijer Andersson as a dishevelled and soiled waif intruding into a suburban swimming pool. While Fever Ray's material owes an obvious debt to that other Northern child of nature, Bjork, particularly in the strangely innocent way she delivers her oblique lyrics of introspection and menace, she's very much her own woman. She brings to the album the same use of reverb-drenched keyboards and creepily pitch-shifted vocals (cf: Dry And Dusty), often approaching the dislocated an…
