Fever Ray - If I Had A Heart

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5...according to our Brett on Wed 11 Feb, 2009.

Silent Shout by The Knife is probably my favourite LP of the last few years so some sort of re-emergance is a welcome thing indeed. Apparently they're working on some sort of opera which should fit the theatricality of their stuff pretty perfectly but in the meantime we've got Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer Andersson's solo projecty thing. 'If I Had a Heart' is a typically atypical lead-off single for an album, being a dirgey creeper with a hypnotic, metallic chill of a heartbeat. Strangely the vocal interplay of The Knife is replicated quite faithfully with the cleaner vocals contrasted with the deeper, more highly effected ones though presumably this time it's solely the lady herself doing the work. It's all well sinister and for some reason it's reminding me of that Doctor Who episode with the scary statue things that move around when you're not looking.. Maybe transpose those nasty monsters to the deserted nighttime garden of a mazey stately home and you've got some sort of approximation of the atmosphere I'm feeling. Fuck Buttons drop in to contribute a remix for the flip, pounding away with dulled beats while the a small snippet of the original track swirls around itself endlessly before making me contradict myself by ending very abruptly. A high quality 7", with the album to follow..

TRACKLISTING:
A IF I HAD A HEART
B IF I HAD A HEART (F**K BUTTONS RMX)

OVERVIEW:
Fever Ray, aka Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of The Knife, is set to release her debut self-titled single on 16th February and her debut album to follow late March 2009 on Rabid Records.

Fever Ray is the title, of both project and album, an evocation of the music’s sound, intense and anxious, yet luminous. It’s the culmination of work that began in 2007 when Karin and Olof, the brother-sister duo who are The Knife, decided to take time out following a handful of incredible live shows. Their first two albums did well in their Swedish homeland; their third, Silent Shout, went to Number One, won six Swedish Grammys, underlined their reputation as an act capable of the truly extraordinary and was pronounced the best record of 2006 by Pitchfork.
After having her second child and eight months of the most productive daydreaming later, Karin had a batch of new songs and the raw materials for the production of Fever Ray. Unsure how to get them over the finishing line, she took half to Christoffer Berg (who mixed The Knife’s work), half to Stockholm production duo Van Rivers & The Subliminal Kid for a final brush and tickle.
One thing’s for sure – in a country with a wealth of leftfield pop artists, Karin Dreijer Andersson sounds like no one but herself. Constantly inventive, restlessly emotive, Fever Ray swaggers, broods, intrigues and dazzles without ever making concessions to the soap opera demands of modern media.
“I think the music should be able to stand for itself without interfering, like what the artist looks like. That’s something you find out during the process, it’s a steady ongoing process about how you survive. When you work with music, you have the possibility to create magic.”

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