Fever Ray, Fever Ray

At the end of the day, I have to admit it’s the accent that makes Fever Ray’s self-titled debut so strangely, darkly alluring. Fever Ray everything-woman Karin Dreijer Andersson, who’s made her name as half of oddball Swedish electro-pop duo The Knife, has that Scandinavian lilt to her high- (and low-, but I’ll get to that) pitched voice and alien, decidedly non-English phrasing that makes everything she sings sound like it’s coming out of the mouth of the eldritch Elf Queen of the Winter Court or something. Andersson’s voice, when married to the brooding keys and beats she orchestrates beneath and around the words, turns what would probably end up being fairly bland electro tracks into something wholly Other.

Things get off to a promising start with “If I Had a Heart” and its throbbing bass tones and shifting, deep-sea murkiness, the bass providing both the anchor for the song and leading the melody, at the same time; it’s a duet, of sorts, between Andersson’s un-affected voice and a weirdly low, vocoder-like vocal that sounds surprisingly masculine but that I’m guessing is Andersson again, just run through some kind of distortion filter. The effect makes me think of the slowed-down sample of Horace Andy from Snooze’s The Man in the Shadow, where Andy’s voice sounded so rough and deep I didn’t realize for years that the guy’s voice is actually pretty damn high.

That space works in her favor, allowing the songs on the album to breathe rather more than they might otherwise. It’s all the ramblings in the dark of a possibly-disturbed person, but there’s an openness to it throughout, like it’s all happening in a very large, very empty room, or maybe standing on a silent hillside above town. Spooky, dark, and sometimes menacing, maybe, but nothing out-and-out evil. I find it intriguing, by the way, that Andersson primarily wrote Fever Ray after having her second child; while parenthood definitely has its share of late, late nights, this isn’t exactly the sort of nighttime music that moves through my head when I rock my kid to sleep. At least, it wasn’t, before now.