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Fever Ray by: Fever Ray

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Rating: - The Knfe but less so...

Two weeks before release everyone's giving this four and ahalf stars and blathering on about how wonderfully 'out there' it all is. Well, if you liked Silent Shout (which I did) this is something of a disappointement. That's not to say it's not very good. She's undeniably an original artist with a fine line in disturbing, almost nightmarish lyrics.
But what's lacking is her brother's way with a sequencer. The tunes are less alluring than the duo's and the instrumjentation a tad more mundane.
What I object to is the ill-informed way people obviously too young to know what they're on about get wildly hyperbolic about such stuff.
Let's face it she owes a vast amount to Bjork. And just because it has synthesizers on it doesn't make it like BLADERUNNER for god's sake.
Oh, and it's a PITCH SHIFTER, not a bloody vocoder.
Still a nice album tho...

Rating: - Blunted Knife

This is a very different type of album compared to `Silent Shout' by The Knife, the tempo is slow throughout and the songs are based around the vocals which means `Fever Ray' requires more effort to unravel. There are no thumping tracks like `Neverland' or `Like a Pen' here. Instead we have ten atmospheric songs full of mysterious lyrics and a strange musical backing that sounds like the Bladerunner soundtrack mixed with traditional ceremonial music from the Far East and Africa. Where it works this album is intoxicating - where it doesn't it fades into background music. Listening to ten relatively similar tracks (particularly vocally) can be a bit of a struggle so this is probably best seen as an album to dip into and play four or five songs at a time. The lyrics are well worth deciphering and are surprisingly tender and personal.

The highlights for me are the creepy Concrete Walls, Boards of Canada inspired `Dry and Dusty' and the cute but not too cute `Seven'.

A decent solo effort that leaves me intrigued as to where The Knife will go on their next release.

Rating: - Bladerunner goes pop (8/10)

I'd just finished mildly mocking Bon Iver's Auto-Tune ballad `In the Woods' from his recent `Blood Bank EP` when Fever Ray's Vocoder-heavy debut album landed in my inbox with a mechanical clunk. Fever Ray is Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of Sweden's much admir'd avant-electro outfit The Knife, whose `Silent Shout` topped many a 2006 end-of-year list including the likes of Pitchfork. But The Knife are no picnic, adopting an occasionally abrasive textural orthodoxy: the use of vocoders for almost all vocals and a highly artificial sonic pallette (pure Vangelis synths, few samples) that is more post-techno than electronica. Robots singing can make for a poignant, secluded voice, as Radiohead famously employed to deliberately dehumanising effect on `Kid A` - but to my mind Add N to X's haunting robot duet `BP Perino' has never been bettered (maybe). Like The Knife, Dreijer Andersson is committed to the application of Auto-Tune for the greater part of her Fever Ray debut. But rather than serving as a synthetic mask, it adds an expressionistic and textural range to her caterwauling vocals - think Bjork in a hair pulling ambush on Gang Gang Dance's Lizzi Bougatsos - otherwise beyond her means: from (paranoid) android and androgynous, to wheezy and ill-sounding (on `Dry and Dusty'), to deep and husky ('Concrete Walls'). It's an unusual approach since Fever Ray's lyrical threads are less sinister than those on `Silent Shout': more intimate, less conceptual. Lyrics about dishwasher tablets are either mind-numbingly prosaic or charmingly offbeat, depending on how you look at it, but you can't deny the odd little fission sparked by distorting these wistful musings with a such distortional device. Moreover, Andersson's unshowy melodic gifts and pop sensibility radiate through the dissonance.

Whereas texturally Fever Ray is very much in the same territory as The Knife, it's less sonically busy: there is no virulent dancefloor electro or jet engine bass frequencies. Slow-motion synth pop from start to finish, Andersson's solo work is most indebted to Vangelis' symphonic approach to electronic music: the uncluttered chords and deceptively simple arrangements. On a number of tracks ('Seven', `Triangle Walls', for example) there are Far Eastern inflections which again recall Bladerunner's reimagined Tokyo and the dystopian electro of Warp pioneers Black Dog Productions. Often opening with buzzing drones, the tracks morph and pulse gently around a central theme, with only subtle adjustments of tension. Unashamedly cinematic, almost stately, Fever Ray will be compared to Kate Bush - particularly when Andersson's voice is left untreated ('Keep the Streets Empty For Me') - but the songwriting here is much less histrionic, far more economic than that. It's a much-used cliché but this really is headphone music, to appreciate the stealthily immersive layering of synths, and the unfussy (i.e., glitch free) but thoughtful drum patterns (check out the way the Ping Pong percussion slowly insists itself on `I'm Not Done'). Icy but intimate, experimental but quietly infectious, Fever Ray's debut deserves to garner the same admiration as The Knife, if not more.

Rating: - Excellent and Mysterious

This is the debut album from Fever Ray (she's Karin Dreijer Andersson). A great and evocative voice, Karin is in tune and here brings your sound (a style alike The Knife), some more natural, a eletronic world music. She creates a mysthical atmosphere (like Bjork), but some songs keeps the connection to the 80's like the excellent Seven, and still great songs with her normal vocal (no synthetic proccess) Keep Street Empty For Me, Now's The Only Time I Know" and When I Grow Up.
A delicious travel around a mysterious world, that just only Karin knows the roads.

Rating: - Excellent and Mysterious

This is the debut album from Fever Ray (she's Karin Dreijer Andersson). A great and evocative voice, Karin is in tune and here brings your sound (a style alike The Knife), some more natural, a eletronic world music, the lyrics are like stories, stories almost like something in the shadows, simple and mysterious it take you away to a distant world. Wonderful! She creates a mysthical atmosphere (like Bjork), but some songs keeps the connection to the 80's like the excellent Seven, and still great songs with her normal vocal (no synthetic proccess) Keep Street Empty For Me, Now's The Only Time I Know" and When I Grow Up.
A delicious travel around a mysterious world, that just only Karin knows the roads.

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