The Knife is on its own trip. The Swedish brother-sister electronic act, made up of Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, has managed to maintain some semblance of mystery despite all manner of Internet hype, blog cred, and homeland stardom. The two have no urgency to capitalize on the fevered stateside reception to 2006 album Silent Shout, and no pressure to follow up with anything conventional (they’re currently scoring an art-house opera inspired by Charles Darwin). The Knife’s 2004 album, Deep Cuts, was an exercise in obvious techno riffing and overly competent dance hooks, but it didn’t register with an indie stateside scene that usually devours that kind of detached, Eurotrash cool.
Their breakthrough came with the considerably darker, more experimental electro-pop of Silent Shout. Besides containing at least a couple of absolutely perfect songs, the album proved Olof to be a deft programmer of wonky atmospherics, as he spun rubbery notes and whale noises into otherwise sharp electro riffs. But Karin’s vocals were the strategic centerpiece, and the siblings bent her voice across every point on the arc. Her vocals are naturally pretty and sweet, but after dense multitracking and filtering through vocoders and pitch and octave shifters, the sound was rarely recognizable as female, and ranged from nightmarish and ghoulish to cartoonish and squeaky.
Silent Shout was a critical smash, but it left the siblings burned out with the recording process, The Knife, and each other. Olof moved to Germany, where he is currently a DJ, spinning minimalist house beats. Karin gave birth to her second child and then picked up a pen. In November of 2007, she spent eight months alone in a recording studio in Stockholm. “At first, it was hard to distinguish between my ideas and Olof’s ideas, because we had been working so closely for so many years,” she says. “But once I got into it, it became a good deal of fun.” The result is Fever Ray, Karin’s new project with a self-titled solo debut that came out this March.
Fever Ray is the kind of shift in sound that one might expect from an artist on the back end of a significant life event and at a crossroads in her career. It’s down-tempo, moody, and reflective. Karin laid the vocals, took care of the programming, and even infused some uncharacteristic organic flourishes. She plays guitar on the album, and a closer listen reveals a wealth of instrumentation to fill in the fringe spaces (congas, piano, live drumming).
Despite the myriad elements at work, these songs are subtle growers. Even the up-tempo tracks feel restrained. On the first single, “If I Had a Heart,” Karin’s vocals are multi-tracked and pitch-shifted to doom over a droning, subsonic bass. Whether it’s the pitter-patter electronics of “When I Grow Up” or the sparkle-and-shoot keys on “Dry and Dusty,” these songs build without ever threatening to overheat. The second half of the album is an even greater departure from The Knife, with hard electro clacks and sparse, syncopated beats that feel influenced by the British dubstep scene.
Ambiguity, abstraction, bizarre connections, and strange associations flow volcanically from Karin’s songwriting. There certainly are more predictable ways for a mother to express the observation of her children than singing, “Dangling feet from window frame / will they ever, ever reach the floor?” But that’s the way Karin writes, with just enough details for the listener to project his or her own meat onto Karin’s skeletal outlines.
She’s quick to talk about how the visual arts influence her songwriting, citing filmmakers Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers) and Finnish minimalist Aki Kaurismaki as direct influences. Those two directors fill the screen with ideas rather than words, and that sense of a-literalism translates into the cloudy possibilities of a Fever Ray song. Karin even went so far as to say that Fever Ray’s small-bore electronic structure was paced after Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man.
This affection for the visual arts carries into Karin’s performances, and indeed, theater has always been a large part of The Knife’s identity. Karin and Olof often appear in bizarre costumes for photo shoots, their live shows feature the pair in full-body (head and face included) vinyl suits, they obstruct the stage with netting, and they generally assault the audience with lights and bizarre film clips that are strategically pegged to the sound or theme of a song.
Karin will tell you that rather than being theater for the sake of mystery building, this is an attempt at bringing the music to the forefront by separating the listener from both the artist and the source of the sound. “I don’t think that it’s about being mysterious, and it’s nothing that I’m trying to do,” she says. “The music itself should be so good that it doesn’t have to be attached to a person or a face.”
That theory may play to the core of The Knife’s identity, but Fever Ray is obviously the work of a solo artist. With Fever Ray, Karin gives listeners a glimpse behind the masks. “When my first child came, it had a big influence on the Silent Shout album,” she says. “But with Olof involved, it was difficult to incorporate some of those ideas. I’ve taken it a little bit further on this album; I think it’s more personal.”
As a blue-blooded artist, Karin surely will infuse Fever Ray with a unique aesthetic. She’s currently practicing with a band (this is a new discipline for her) before hitting the road for shows in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Andreas Nilsson, a long-time collaborator and choreographer for The Knife, will be directing the Fever Ray performances (he’s also responsible for Karin’s über-creepy “If I Had a Heart” video, in which two children are calmly shuttled away from the nightmarish scene of a cult procedural gone wrong). Karin was hesitant to give away too many details of the live performance, but let on that “it will be a collision between analog and high tech, but more organic to fit the Fever Ray sound.”
On top of supporting the Fever Ray album, she will join Olof in the studio for another Knife album sometime next year. After divulging that development, Karin lets out an unscripted laugh, as if she had just run through a mental checklist of everything that’s currently on her plate. “But 2009,” she says, “is for Fever Ray.”