"I caught a glimpse, now it haunts me."

Fever Ray, self-titled
Immediately after completing a stunning set of live shows, the first they'd ever undertaken (thankfully captured for posterity on the shoddily-titled An Audio-Visual Experience), The Knife announced in 2006 that they were going on a lengthy hiatus, with no activity on the horizon until 2010. It seemed like a rest was well-deserved: Silent Shout wasn't just the record of the year, for me and many others it felt like the event of the year. We'd been treated to something truly special, and waiting until siblings Karin and Olof felt the time was right to return to their decks would give us time to continue to absorb the work they'd already put out. So, the announcement of a single and video from Karin's solo project, Fever Ray, and an almost immediate digital album release thereafter, had the element of surprise well on its side. We'd hardly wrapped our heads around the possibility of more creepy electro from everyone's favourite pitchshift-happy chanteuse, let alone had the chance to have our expectations ramped up with preemptive Silent Shout comparisons, before the record was upon us.

While skin-crawling lead single and track "If I Had A Heart" suggested that we'd be treated to an impenetrably dark and menacing record, beatless tracks shrouded in veils of mist thick enough to make Silent Shout seem like a walk in the park, that's not quite the case. This record is indeed informed by the quantum leap that the siblings made between Deep Cuts and Silent Shout, but it also bears the influence of all three records they made together. The clean synthpop geometry of The Knife's self-titled debut is in effect on "Dry And Dusty" and "Triangle Walks", and there are also hints of mellower moments from the Deep Cuts era, like "She's Having A Baby" and "This Is Now" scattered throughout. While Fever Ray could pass for a Knife album if we were none the wiser, knowing that Olof isn't on board this time does yield some subtle distinctions between this record and Karin's previous work.

Fever Ray is sparser than The Knife's output, and eschews most semblances of dance music for the sake of evocative synth landscapes. I could just be hearing what I want to, but I can almost detect some hints of YMO's electronic exotica. Melodies are understated, but rise through repeat listens with hypnotic certainty. It's nothing if not an atmospheric record, but we shouldn't take that term to simply be shorthand for "the unsettling mood of Silent Shout" or even the funereal gloom which borders on being black metalesque in the case of "If I Had A Heart". The closing track uses a processional rhythm as the basis for a vocal performance by Andersson which can only be described as hymnal, but given that the track's called "Coconut", I'm sure as hell not going to hazard a guess as to what it's a hymn to.

Fever Ray is an album for homes and for forests, but perhaps not the haunted marble houses and chthonian woods which Silent Shout cast us spiraling into. There are hints of nostalgia and warmth to the strangeness, almost as though we're revisiting spaces from childhood at night, seeing them through a glass darkly but rediscovering lost moods and moments, even if full understanding remains occluded.

Bonus tidbits:
-The album art was done by none other than Charles Burns, author of the crap-yr-pants awesome Black Hole comics, which were the inspiration for the hella creepy "Silent Shout" video.
-The contact page of the Fever Ray site has booking contact info, so we might be lucky enough to see Karin take this album on the road.

Fever Ray, "Triangle Walks"