Fever Ray

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 androgyny that she used on The Knife's brilliant Silent Shout album. There is a vague sense of holding pattern here rather than massive innovation. Without brother Olof as a guiding hand on the droning sequencers the tunes fall a bit by the wayside. Keep The Streets Empty For Me, for instance, consists of little more than two note backing leavened only by a questionable pan pipe sample. But this very tiny drawback doesn't stop Fever Ray from being the kind of brilliant album that it may not make sense to play if you're prone to nightmares. It's a wayward but rewarding venture into territory that challenges and provokes. But it's not for the squeamish. -BBC Music