Recommended Listening

It would be easy to describe this record simply as "The Knife 2.0," but that would be selling it short. Fever Ray is the solo album by Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of The Knife- but to hear this record, you'd think she made up 60 or 70 percent of that band. The eerie pitch-shifted vocal harmonies are present, but the kooky witch-party-on-a-pirate-ship lurch and swagger of Silent Shout has been replaced by a brooding, paranoid-nostalgic sense of melancholy. The lyrics read like blog posts filtered through a fugue-state, and the wonderful compositions back them up superbly. The overall atmosphere is something like if Depeche Mode did a dubstep record, but even that description doesn't do this record justice. Like all of Dreijer Andersson's previous work, this one must be heard to be believed.