Fever Ray - Fever Ray
I've decided to resurrect this blog for music review writing. I think a lot about music and I need a place where I can write down what is in my head about a song or an album before it consumes my brain and makes me go insane. I see and feel music as well as listen to it. A great album for me conjures images, memories of things that have not happened to me, colours, moods and even crochet patterns.
Fever Ray - Fever Ray
It used to be simple. When I worked in a record shop during college a cool new album would come out and we'd listen to it in the shop. If I liked it I'd put a copy away and buy it with the handy discount on the next pay day. Now with the internet I work harder to find new sounds. I rarely get an album when it's released and sometimes don't hear of an artist for ages after they've appeared even if they are someone I'd usually like. I like it better this way. I listen to more unusual music and I listen to stuff I like with less outside influence. There's not much advertising of albums even major ones now a days. My friends don't like the stuff I like and as I get older I'm less influenced by them. Blog lists and end of year reviews and stumbling upon stuff via MySpace, Last.Fm and message boards seem to be how I find music now.
I heard about Fever Ray first in the end of year reviews in Uncut and Nylon magazines. Both of them described it with words like eerie electronic and it intrigued me. Especially as they said the lady in question Karin Dreijer Andersson was something of a strange recluse. Women who are strange make some of the best music but that's a musing for another time.
I got hold of the album and played it not expecting so much. I was wrong. I listened to the first two songs and then I listened to them again and again and... You get the picture. I played those first two songs on repeat for a whole day. I eventually managed to drag myself away from the menacing album opener If I had a heart and listened to the rest of it. Thankfully the rest of the album lives up to those first two songs. I then spent a day listening to Keep The Streets Empty For Me. Becoming obsessed by three songs on an album is a rare treat.
This album reminded me instantly of a caving trip I made into Fergus River Cave. It's a dry dusty ominous place. The farmer who owns the land told us that in flood water spouts under pressure from the entrance. The entrance was bone dry when we went there. There is an awful sense of foreboding as you make your way through the cave as you know a heavy shower of rain will flood the cave completely and there is nowhere to wait out the flood, you will drown. On our trip all was well but the threat was ever present. The same sense of dread runs through this Fever Ray album.
The cave has a beautiful bedding cave crawl where the roof is low only about 50-80cm above your head so you must crawl on the sandy floor. But even though the roof is low the sides of the cave stretch out 100 metres on either side of you. Your torch illuminates at either side the roof sloping down to eventually meet the floor far away at the edge of your sight. When I first heard Dry and Dusty I was instantly transported back to that crawl, oppressed from above but with massive amounts of space on either side.
Two weeks after writing the above I'm still listening to this album and loving it. I think it will become one of those favourites that gets copied onto the ipod and never taken off.
Stand out tracks: If I Had A Heart, When I Grow Up, Keep The Streets Empty For Me
Fever Ray - Fever Ray
It used to be simple. When I worked in a record shop during college a cool new album would come out and we'd listen to it in the shop. If I liked it I'd put a copy away and buy it with the handy discount on the next pay day. Now with the internet I work harder to find new sounds. I rarely get an album when it's released and sometimes don't hear of an artist for ages after they've appeared even if they are someone I'd usually like. I like it better this way. I listen to more unusual music and I listen to stuff I like with less outside influence. There's not much advertising of albums even major ones now a days. My friends don't like the stuff I like and as I get older I'm less influenced by them. Blog lists and end of year reviews and stumbling upon stuff via MySpace, Last.Fm and message boards seem to be how I find music now.
I heard about Fever Ray first in the end of year reviews in Uncut and Nylon magazines. Both of them described it with words like eerie electronic and it intrigued me. Especially as they said the lady in question Karin Dreijer Andersson was something of a strange recluse. Women who are strange make some of the best music but that's a musing for another time.
I got hold of the album and played it not expecting so much. I was wrong. I listened to the first two songs and then I listened to them again and again and... You get the picture. I played those first two songs on repeat for a whole day. I eventually managed to drag myself away from the menacing album opener If I had a heart and listened to the rest of it. Thankfully the rest of the album lives up to those first two songs. I then spent a day listening to Keep The Streets Empty For Me. Becoming obsessed by three songs on an album is a rare treat.
This album reminded me instantly of a caving trip I made into Fergus River Cave. It's a dry dusty ominous place. The farmer who owns the land told us that in flood water spouts under pressure from the entrance. The entrance was bone dry when we went there. There is an awful sense of foreboding as you make your way through the cave as you know a heavy shower of rain will flood the cave completely and there is nowhere to wait out the flood, you will drown. On our trip all was well but the threat was ever present. The same sense of dread runs through this Fever Ray album.
The cave has a beautiful bedding cave crawl where the roof is low only about 50-80cm above your head so you must crawl on the sandy floor. But even though the roof is low the sides of the cave stretch out 100 metres on either side of you. Your torch illuminates at either side the roof sloping down to eventually meet the floor far away at the edge of your sight. When I first heard Dry and Dusty I was instantly transported back to that crawl, oppressed from above but with massive amounts of space on either side.
Two weeks after writing the above I'm still listening to this album and loving it. I think it will become one of those favourites that gets copied onto the ipod and never taken off.
Stand out tracks: If I Had A Heart, When I Grow Up, Keep The Streets Empty For Me