Fever Ray
Fever Ray
(Etcetc)
If you’re partial to a hung over viewing of Video Hits on a Sunday morning, you might have been watching a few weeks back when Howling Bells were the band with a record to plug and “co-hosting” duties to attend to. Amongst other things, they chose the decidedly spooky video for ‘If I Had a Heart’, the opening track off this fantastic record. The video clearly frightened Channel 10 execs, as they edited out all the scary bits and cut the song off after about two minutes.
As a statement of intent, ‘If I Had a Heart’ is as compelling a beginning to Fever Ray as you could imagine. Like its video, it’s ominous and disquieting for a reason you can’t quite put your finger on– both adjectives that also apply to the majority of this record. For her solo project, The Knife’s Karin Dreijer has taken her cue from the darkest corners of her band’s 2006 opus Silent Shout, tracks like ‘From Off to On’ and ‘Still Night’, and spun an entire album from those shadowy places.
Compared to The Knife’s work, Fever Ray is far less banging – the shimmering synth pads and thumping beats are gone, replaced by dubby sound textures and minimalist percussion. The sense of space gives these songs the feeling of empty rooms in a dark house, through which Dreijer’s distorted vocals whisper and echo, treated with a variety of effects and pitchshifters to twist and bend them into strange forms.
The lyrics are similarly oblique and dream-like. Childhood is a recurrent subject, with several of the songs seeming to take the form of half-remembered memories – ‘Seven’ deals with an imaginary friend and ‘When I Grow Up’ is a catalogue of increasingly surreal ambitions. Other lyrics are harder to decipher, but still manage to leave you feeling distinctly uneasy – “We have water mouth,” sings Dreijer in the closing ‘Coconut’, “Sand in pockets and a strained household.”
The imagery doesn’t make any sense – but then dreams never do, and this whole album has the sense of some childhood nightmare that you can’t quite seem to wake up from.