Live Review

Fever Ray – Brixton Academy, London

• 10th Sep 2010

Trust the Swedes to turn the Brixton Academy into a palace of understated cool.
Last night, its sound-swallowing cavern was flooded with a thick smoky haze, wow-inducing lasers pierced the gloom and vintage lamps on stage pulsed along to the music like glowing jellyfish.

Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of The Knife performing solo at the moment as Fever Ray, inhabited the stage as a shadowy wraith, standing stock-still in an enormous Wicked Witch of the East hat, while her masked band hopped around in the smoke. Mysterious, creepy, kinda cool. Perhaps a wee bit silly?

With just the one, self-titled, album to tour with, the set list held few surprises. The show even opened with the album’s first track, ‘If I Had a Heart’, that initial wavering, electronic fuzz slowly invading into the room and making the skin on your arms prickle in anticipation.

The dark, melancholic melodies worked well in 3D, swelling the room with thick atmospheric layers of sound that even the Academy couldn’t suppress. The higher-pitched tones picked up a nice added dimension too, in that big echoey space.

The recently released cover of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Mercy’ made a welcome appearance, but it was ‘Now’s the Only Time I Know’ that provided the oh-yes-this-is-live experience. The lasers went off, the jellyfish went dim and the figures on stage became slightly more visible, bouncing along to the track and getting the crowd worked up. “Oh yeah,” we remembered, “There are people up there.”

Ay, and there’s the rub. While visually and aurally stunning, the show failed to get the old emotions charged. Which was bound to happen – how do we connect with an artist hiding behind fog and masks? It seems a bit odd that while touring an album that feels so personal, one that seems to give an insight into her psyche, Andersson should keep us so very much at a distance when performing.

Support act Zola Jesus was more successful on that front. With none of the big smoke, big sound, big show to wow the crowd with, she still managed to make an impact. Perhaps because she was so personally, vulnerably there, her diminutive figure maniacally pacing to and fro across the stage as she snagged us in with her rich, impressive voice.

Andersson has hinted that she’ll be returning to her work with The Knife, so this might have been her last show as Fever Ray. If that’s the case, she’s ended things with a rather impressive bang. Whether that bang resonates though, well, that’s another matter.