After the blood and wound epic PLUNGE, which was intense in every respect, Karin Dreijer, aka Fever Ray, turned six years later to the subject of love and romance. Or the mythical ideas and attributions with which mankind has always charged the famous tingling in the stomach and other physical states. Just looking at the album cover should make it clear that Fever Ray’s experimental setup doesn’t produce any pleasing love songs, little hearts as i-dots or not. A friendly-interested alien looks deep into your heart, until it becomes uncomfortable.
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“Tapping Fingers,” for example, is one of the saddest yet tenderest tracks half of The Knife has ever written: “Let me know / If this is the last day / We run our bodies as we go to sleep / Tapping fngers as a way to speak,” Dreijer asks about the foggy sounds that depressingly don’t seem to get anywhere. Love is just a pale ghost wandering between the bed sheets and the bedroom door, the once lovers speechless. Atmospherically completely different is the ice-cold dancefloor hit “Even It Out”: With a squeaky voice, Fever Ray demands justice for a bullied schoolchild. Here parental love is distorted into monstrous violence, you don’t want to be in Zacharias’ (the sung Bully) skin, because it will soon bleed: “Just even it out / And then we cut cut cut cut.”
Like from a predator’s perspective
Dreijer’s brother Olof worked on four of the ten songs on RADICAL ROMANTICS, the siblings’ first collaboration in a good eight years, the video for “Kandy” is a chilling replica of “Pass This On”. Nevertheless, RADICAL ROMANTICS is not a The Knife reunion. Karin Dreijer has brought in Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross as additional producers, as well as Portuguese DJ and producer Nídia, Johannes Berglund, Peder Mannerfelt, Pär Grindvik and Vessel. The illustrious crowd lets every track shimmer in different (sound) colors, from rabbit hole dark to painfully glaring, we are on Fever Ray’s comfortably creepy, always lurching terrain.
With vocals distorted beyond recognition, Dreijer vainly invokes their magical powers (“I tried all the tricks that I can / Cinnamon burnin’ in the oven”) on “What They Call Us”, stuttering percussion and siren-like sound effects create claustrophobic vibes. The sirens get louder and more urgent in the lasciviously vibrating “Shiver”, a love song (well…) as if from the perspective of a predator: Should you eat the found treat or make it with it? You can dance to the single “Carbon Dioxide”, but you have to be careful not to trip over your own feet in the impassable synth beat battle.
It’s kind of romantic. But above all radical.
Irritating noises and voices lurk everywhere, misplaced steel drums create a fake South Seas feeling, as if you were in the Tropical Island amusement park, “New Utensils” sounds like techno without bass. In the final track “Bottom Of The Ocean”, which was originally conceived for an Ingmar Bergman performance at the Royal Swedish Dramatic Theatre, Dreijer lets the syllable sequence “Oh Oh Oh Oh” climb up and down a small scale for seven minutes – that’s it kind of romantic. But above all radical.
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