Album excerpts:

"If I Had a Heart"

"Seven"

"Coconut"

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Fever Ray : Fever Ray
released on Mute Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Karin Dreijer Andersson has gotten very good at obscuring herself. As both a solo artist and one half of the Knife, she has spent the past decade manipulating everything from her voice and appearance to her memories and feelings, writing oblique lyrics and performing in theatrical costumes and masks. These moves go beyond mere showmanship; they are part of what makes music so exciting for her. "I think it's very interesting when you can remove yourself from the music, even if you are the one creating it," she said in an interview she gave to The Tripwire a few weeks ago. "That's the thing with music, it allows you the possibilities to erase yourself for certain moments."

Dreijer Andersson's fans were probably thrilled when they heard "If I Had a Heart" or saw the cover of her latest solo project, Fever Ray. The eponymously titled debut announces her continued use of that strategy. The black and white woodcut-styled image, of a woman in a clearing, with rotting, deserted houses behind her and a thick wall of forest (us) before her, is unsettling and distant. It stands Dreijer Andersson between the past and the present, and casts Fever Ray, the beam of energy she holds in her hands, as potential energy, something both personal and enigmatic, between the past and the future.

Album art rarely describes its musical contents this well, but Martin Ander, the man who designed this cover, has done that here. Fever Ray is haunting and mysterious, dominated by dark atmospherics and enigmatic but compelling lyrics. Half of the tracks, co-produced by Christoffer Berg, who helped Dreijer Andersson and her brother Olof with the Knife's Silent Shout, evoke that clearing, filled with pinging bird calls ("Dry and Dusty"), hissing, distant tides ("Triangle Walks"), and creeping shadows ("If I Had a Heart"). The other half, produced by Van Rivers and the Subliminal Kid, of the Stockholm production outfit Five Guys and a Dog, describe the forest and our modern world as one and the same, pitting distant yowls against bubbling drum machines ("When I Grow Up"), yawning, New Order-esque synthesizers against egg shakers and likembe ("Coconut"). Together, they form something that's both ominous and serene, a world marked simultaneously by the natural and the artificial, the past and the future, and the balance struck between these contradictions is perfect.

It's also the perfect environment for Dreijer Andersson's songs, which are hard to pin down individually and together form a tantalizingly incomplete picture of their singer. Part of this has to do with the voices: on tracks that face subjects personal to her (insatiability on "If I Had a Heart," her newborn child on "Concrete Walls"), Dreijer Andersson uses the same creepy, pitched-down effects found on Silent Shout; when she sings about the past, she sings with an almost girlish shrillness, tugging on the high notes ("When I Grow Up"); when she sings about the future ("Keep the Streets Empty For Me"), she brings in a new voice altogether, her friend Cecilia Nordlund's. Each song is filled with details that allude to her ordinariness, yet they add up to nothing at all. They are jumbled and incomplete, and they neither comfort us nor indict her, or vice versa. Fever Ray reveals only that Karin Dreijer Andersson is human. The other, more private information that we tend to crave from musicians - her hopes, fears, passions, mistakes - is shrouded in a fog that suggests not so much a lack of clarity or pretentiousness, but instead a profound uncertainty, as though Dreijer Andersson herself is unsure of what it all adds up to. But thanks to the music's tension and energy, Fever Ray also suggests that this uncertainty is a vital force to be respected, that we ought to venerate the parts of ourselves that remain in the shadows.

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