Fever Ray | LSDXOXO
Albert Hall, Manchester
1st March 2024
As if summoned and sucked in from another dimension and, would you believe, crash land into Manchester’s Albert Hall, Fever Ray and their band deliver the power of the unknown. By Ryan Walker.
Support this evening came from Berlin-based producer and DJ LSDXOXO. Both the dog and the chain, the god and the clergy, the master and servant of surrealistic, techno-infused pop. J’adore, Feak No. 2 and Overload from latest EP, Delusions of Grandeur (DOG) is out now owned by Fantasy Audio Group (FAG).
It’s in the stare with Fever Ray. It’s the stare of an immensely joyful demon wielding the winds around them- slowly dodging quick bullets. The sort of stare that would gladly take a staple gun to your forehead or suck your fingers clean. The sort of stare that smiles and could silence thousands of traffic.
Or maybe it’s in the twitching fingers and the neck jerks. Dance moves like someone possessed from inside. Like something puppeteered from above. A conductor of electric whispers. A transhuman collective harnessing something from the heavens or trying to uproot something deeply lodged below the floorboards – closer to hell. A balance on a trapeze between sleaze and subtle eruptions of emotion that boils over into the hall- a lava lake of rage.
Maybe it’s in the one with the old egg timer halo banging away at a drums while standing up. Or maybe its adjacent to their left with either a miniaturized nebula or the retrieved end of a cotton earbud stuck to their head. Maybe it’s in the white suit. The short peroxide haircut. The tie. The godawful black grandad shoes shoplifted from Wynsors.
But more than likely it’s in the music.
The tunes are expressed through the impressive presentation. The presentation is likewise – encased in the tunes to create a sense of adventure, an experiment, a piece of alien folklore, some narrative neither entirely dreamlike nor nightmarish, but is all the more captivating because of how it both cradles the audience, as well as crashes into them as waves would envelop an unsuspecting beach about to be wiped blank.
Folks attending the sold-out show tonight by Fever Ray (Karin Dreijer) have an inkling of what they’re in for but really – they are totally flabbergasted by what unfolds. They are unaware and lap up the unknown.
By pulling on a range of material from their future-facing catalog of material, Fever Ray’s repertoire resonates loud and clear. Eclipsing her work with the Knife with brother and artist Olof Dreijer (not that anyone’s competing, both are artists in their own right), this material mainly hybridizes their debut album and latest offering Radical Romantics such as the bubbling synthwave arpeggios and yawning dawn of What They Call Us, the restless kinetic spells of New Utensils or the manic, climatic rapture of Carbon Dioxide that smothers everything in sight, suffocation before reaching the source of what it means to be alive, in love, at an impasse – a constant peaking before shattering all into pieces of nervous crystals.
Alongside a small smattering of Plunge, stealing the giddy, electronic pop of To the Moon and Back, or the aggressive, rhythmic spit of An Itch, scuttling and skitting, convulsed and corrosive, a commanding presence swinging back and forth between poison drops on a synth’s circuit board and continuous, seductive propulsion through a 5th-dimensional star map, each song aired tonight draws from a uniquely fascinating segment of their career, each a standalone fragment in a series of character developments, concepts that would knock Cronenberg’s socks off, Bowie’s invented identical vessels melted into microwaves, each more momentous, more magnetic, more magnetic, more wild-eyed and dream-weird than the last.
Is there a pill to go with this upon entry?
When I Grow Up from their debut is every bit as beautiful and beatific now as it was when released over 15 years ago – a haunted forest of moans and howls belonging to somethihg hunted or hungry, minimalistic patterns of footprints appear yet nobody is in sight to squash the soles into the soil as Fever Ray’s voice penetrating the air as her sonorous, yearning melody radiates from the cold in a bolt of enchanting warmth. Triangle Walks’ germinated geometric synth-scapes encompass all manner of echoing keys, hypnagogic sparkles of synth keys, woozy Baleric melodies, palpitating pads and constellations of percussions that are gradually unzipped yet acquire much confidence and euphoric charm as it cruises through the night on one of it’s cathartic, metropolitan drives.
There is no pill.
Yet despite Fever Ray’s eccentricity, their illuminating ebulliance, their regular hopscotching from one part of the play, one phase to the next (despite intermittent albums – a way to achieve high art and sit atop the throne of justified aggrandisement is to destroy your history and then rebuild in the silences while cleverly disguising it’s something new in the future) the sensory banquet is powerfully curated that avoids any chances of being a steaming stink-pile of experimental, excessive mess. Instead, they invite one along for the ride in a way that few artists can hope to accomplish.
An ever-present sense of kudos while keeping their curiosity intact, an adamancy that the best work is in tomorrow’s empty pages, keys waiting to be played, beats waiting to eat, body organs waiting to be unlocked, is also a pervading feature of their oeuvre, fragmentation in the name of refinement and exploration that remains infectious, inspiring, empowering even. The now is the aim. The next thing is the purpose to go out searching such glistening treasure.
With tunes such as Shiver or Kandy, the former a sparse, vibrating dance of feral electronic flourishes, attempting to wrap the submerged, cavernous blood-pulse in twists of clingfilm creating a frantic and witchy aura on distant digital worlds, shaken by a blood- curdling scream, out of desire and desperation, the latter a barren yet bulging with detail, layers upon layers of considered space yet intense, delicious detail slavering over that space, all 80s, holographic hexagonal drum pads flamboyantly flirting with the gemstone keyboard lines, part disturbing oddball trip-hop goth and part rotten, reggaeton ricochets from the chameleon’s battlefield, Fever Ray maintains a sense of seamless reverie when mischievously unleashing these tunes.
Always thinking about the future, condensing the power of the universe into a spectacle the size of a venue in the North not losing any of that atmospheric drama and transfixing wonderment and deep mystery and intense heat and spellbinding, empowering, yet dark primal panorama.
Together in a live context, this is where people are genuine, willing victims to the whole extravaganza, salivating to every throbbing techno beat, primaeval persuasive gallop, hard-hitting electronic whip and hiss, imperial synth-pop explosion, industrial metal-on- bone clang, cosmic-camp rock swagger, unfurling drone, dominating vocal in a state of unnerving flux, always oscillating between different pitches – the angel and the devil entwined in the same supernatural larynx, between vulnerability and sophistication, between male and female, between inside and out, between reality and fiction.
At the forefront of blowing apart the binary that allocates an oppositional, socially prescribed gender to everyone and, unless they revolt – prescription from their expressing genuine selves become an eternal purgatory, Fever Ray is the responsible cause for this otherworldly hyperpop, postmodern chaos, this unboxing of an exotic troupe, this unraveling of the dark arts many indeed dare to bravely traverse yet fail to make it back either alive or with any evidence of what has been gleaned from their ventures. Yet always in control and capable of choreographing the oncoming storm, Fever Ray channels it all. He blesses it to their will.
The dark, post-punk drive of Even It Out, all Wax Trax! nocturnal moods, sticky swirls of industrial, kraut wig outs at the death disco knock against immovable formations of depraved machine rhythms. Its an unchanging parade of scuzzy bass and fucking robo-drums that could rip the ribcages of a skyscraper to shreds.
Before the encore, If I Had A Heart guides everything to a strong gravitational point. It grows with an ominous, slow-moving groove, ambient and uncanny, an invocation of static vistas and omens that hovers below the knees like a snake in the grass about to spring, but never does (it enjoys psychical enticement rather than a physical one ). A heaving beat, glowing from somewhere, keeps everything gradually shimmering forwards and apart from the voice – the tune is entirely scant of much else making it all the more moving, the group disappear and then return in black latex hoods as though the cenobites have had a stint in a monk’s monastery.
After it, Coconut is the perfect song to return from whence they came, all butterfly-chrysalis crackles of percussion, milky melodies, wildlife transmissions, desertland whistles and psychedelic drama.
Just what’s the significance of the lantern? It pulses a hypnotic, throbbing warmth of wonderful color like it’s talking or thinking but you could also imagine Gene Kelley wrapping himself around it, only to be evaporated into particles of dust moments later once the lamppost has grown bored of his merriment in shit weather. Maybe this is where they came from. A peaceful place. They sentient mothership glows through the smoke.
This is Fever Ray. Leaving us wanting more. Leaving us wandering what the fuck we’ve just witnessed. Leaving us wandering why they’re less interested in clean sheets in a hotel room in Vegas stuck in the center of a snowglobe and more interested in whose hair is on the pillow. Less interested in clean wine glasses and more interested in whose lipstick impressed upon its murky rim belong to. Fever Ray cares about sex. The body. The flesh. The wilderness. The limit. Touches like a torch.
They touch each other and smile…a lot. They were always smiling.
Please note: Use of these images in any form without permission is illegal. If you wish to contact the photographer please email: mel@mudkissphotography.co.uk
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Fever Ray Website | Youtube | instagram | Facebook | Twitter
All words by Ryan Walker.
All photos by Melanie Smith – Louder Than War | Facebook | Twitter | instagram | Portfolio
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