Fever Ray

S/T

(Rabid)

March 25th, 2009

The Knife’s Silent Shout has to be one of my all-time favorite albums. I’m not particularly observant of electronic music, but what Silent Shout managed to accomplish with their 2006 album never ceases to amaze me. So it goes that I’ll be paying close attention to anything The Knife (comprising Swedish siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson) has to offer in the future. In fact, sister Karin has recently released an album under the moniker Fever Ray for those of us in need of a little somethin’ extra. The brilliant “If I Had A Heart” kicks off the album, with the requisite combination of Karin’s naturally high-pitched vocals and its heavily down-pitched counterpart. Also carrying on from Knife family tradition is the track’s outright scariness, the bassline trudging relentlessly forward, the vocals declaring, “This will never end ‘cause I want more/More, gimme more, gimme more.” Subsequent tracks on the album don’t really follow on the dark promise of “Heart”, with dance-y tracks like “Seven” sticking closer to The Knife’s first album, Deep Cuts than anything else. “Concrete Walls” and “Now’s The Only Time I Know” try for a more organic feel, with shaker percussion trickling into the mix of “Walls” and xylophone making a prominent appearance in “Time” before being subsumed by (you guessed it) heavy synths. Basically, this album is a nice little nugget for those craving some new material from The Knife. “If I Had A Heart” alone seems worth the cover price (so is the music video), and Karin’s voice continues to creepify, its shrill cries slicing the instrumentation seemingly in half, its pitch-altered evil twin’s murmurs providing sharp and frightening contrast. And while the album can feel a bit flat at times, perhaps I’m comparing it a little too insistently to Silent Shout. For better or for worse, The Knife and its individual members have set a sort of high-water mark for subsequent efforts.

–Henry York

Standout track: “If I Had A Heart”

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBAzlNJonO8