Fever Ray - "Fever Ray"

Fever Ray - Dry & Dusty (Mute 2009)

Fever Ray - Fever Ray / Mute

Winter Leak Season '09 was just gearing up in late December when this record seeped through the cracks to find its way to an audience that had largely been caught sleeping. Rightfully so, too: Here was an album due in late March that shouldn't have had any fanfare for at least a month or two, yet there it was seeping slowly onto the Internet purporting to showcase the feminine side of The Knife as a solo artist. You remember Olaf and Karin Dreijer Andersson, right? The patron saints of rural forest techno following Mark Pytlik and Philip Sherburne's cooperative end-of-year anointing in '06? Silent Shout sure seems like a long time ago, though maybe not quite as long as Honey is Cool which, let's be honest, you had never heard of even after you purchased Silent Shout on a whim. Man, remember when people bought albums? Ah, the good old days of a better economy. At least I can still afford wireless.

There remains little debate that Silent Shout was a great album with great timing, pitch-shifting its way through a gap in the indie-electro space-time continuum and coyly filling the space between playfully insular techno and house (Ellen Allien & Apparat and Booka Shade's Movements that spring) and the coming nü-rave juggernaut (Justice's Waters of Nazareth EP that summer). Fever Ray is in a different position: Free of the potential paradigm-renovating gravitas that buoyed its spiritual predecessor, Karin has room to move about the forests of her own dark creation.

You can look at this album one of two ways: Either it's a really nice way to sate your appetite for another Knife album, or it's another Knife album incognito. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but its uncanny resemblance to the sonic template Silent Shout set three years ago makes one wonder what kind of contributions Olaf was making. There is a distinctly muted (no pun intended) tone to this album, to be sure: Standouts like "Dry & Dusty" or the first single, "If I Had a Heart," do not colorfully come out of the woodwork in the same way something like "We Share Our Mother's Health" does. There is less of a techno flash to these songs; rather, Fever Ray as an album trudges quietly through the snow with muffled kicks that don't strictly play to 4/4 convention.

More so than any of her other projects, Fever Ray places Karin's distinctive voice at the center of attention. Not a song goes by that you don't notice her charming pronunciations alienated by her favorite technological trick in the pitch-shifter. Even this can't disguise the natural hooks that seem to sneak out from behind the wooded pines. Everywhere one listens, there is always a memorable melody eerily working its way into your eardrums. It can't help itself. It's a Caribbean pop album ("Triangle Walks") covered by insular Scandinavian electronica.

But I'll be damned if this isn't at the sharp end of the first wave of 2009's leaks. Even though it doesn't alter the way we think about what The Knife has accomplished, and even though it says almost nothing about what Olaf is doing on his behalf for that group (Just sayin', O), it's a great listen because it's so free of attached strings. Listen on your headphones, listen in the car, listen anywhere you want: The end result is that you're still listening. It's been a month and I'm still playing it daily. I see no reason for this trend to continue unabated. Maybe I'll even buy it. That was a joke, sort of.