The venue is around 80-90% full on a Monday night – post festival season, that’s quite a turnout. A mainly young but pretty wide-ranging crowd (by that I mean the hip, the curious, the foreign, the geeks and me), lured here by I think the first Scottish appearance of the Fever Ray roadshow, something of wondrous repute according to reports from the big smoke and some worldwide festival appearances in the last 12-18 months.
Fever Ray is the “project” of and is fronted by Karin Dreijer, a Swedish performer who has in the past been half of acclaimed duo The Knife. The self-titled debut album has gathered its own reputation over the past year or so, making The Times’ ‘top hundred albums of the decade’ etc. The videos and artwork also have some pretty distinctive ideas.
So what happens, then? Well, more smoke than a Govan tyre depot fire for a start, from front of stage and back, during a long silence before the band appear around 9-ish (support act not reviewed, having ma tea and puttin’ weans tae bed) shrouded in clouds and darkness, a bit Spinal Tap to be honest. The set would have to be described as a collection of large standard lamps, flicking on and off, making the whole show look like the Blair Witch Project vs Larry’s Lighting, or David Lynch’s set designer doing war with a vintage Corrie episode.
After the first couple of tracks a fairly effective couple of lasers begin to blind, widen and then expand like spiders’ webs, accentuating the spiny lines of the music and dark corners of the stage.
In between the lasers and the darkness, I think we have five performers on stage, bongos/percussion, keyboards/guitar, satanic stick thing/other stuff, other guitar and lead vocals/demented hat wearing respectively, although at times I really have no idea what they were doing up there.
Why am I here? – For the music, and in the main, it does not disappoint – usually tracks start with sparse, oblique electronic soundscapes with clacking percussion and modulating keyboard backing before the vocals, heavily treated at times, drench over the whole wash of reverb and echo. Often very simple song structures but but building into eerie and exotic atmospheres, there’s a bit of 80s Mode-esque riffing here, even some Banshees/ Cocteaus vibes, but a pretty unique sound. The percussion especially lends a very exotic feel – first time I heard tracks from the album I assumed the act was South American or some World Music thing (Gabriel reference below!) rather than just bloody Swedes – I assume this is deliberate as it takes a lot of effort to reproduce some of these sounds live and a couple of times tonight they actually seem to spoil the mix a bit, along with troublesome backing vocals.
Starting with ‘If I Had A Heart’, most of the album is given a good run-through, along with a cover of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Mercy Street’: in theory completely out of place, but then you hear it alongside the other tracks and the method of composition and the overall feel fits right in, so not a novelty cover at all.
Obviously Fever Ray comes in the footsteps of probably the easiest other “Scandinavian Fruitcake” forebear comparison, Ms Bjork. There is some similarity at times in the lyrical concerns, ‘When I Grow Up’ sharing some of the little girl lost schtick of Sugarcubes’ ‘Birthday’, but it’s a bit lazy – this is a pretty original artist and there are some genuinely eldritch moments in the music which are hard to pull off and are seemingly uncontrived.
By the time we get to ‘When I Grow Up’, easily getting the best crowd reaction for its more commercial sound, Ms Drieser is now almost in full light, allowing us to see just what a ridiculous witch’s/chef’s hat she is wearing, surely the result of losing some kind of bet. She remains impassive however, true to her art and I assume completely bonkers.
Although the band a couple of times do crank it up to eleven and there are a couple of guitar-shredding finales, overall the songs are too structured to take much extended performance noodling. A few tracks I’d have thought they would make more of tend to peter away a bit, I think they could find a way to do a bit more with them live – in fact the whole set lasts a bit over a hour, with no encore, the audience leaving a bit disappointed. I think though that for now, we got the full treatment and don’t have much to complain about – did we want a 20 minute bong solo or a goat sacrifice; some of us have got homes to go to…
They depart the stage having said not a single word to the audience, as far as I can hear, but then you know the cliche about letting it speak, and tonight it does hold true.