- In December 2009 I crowbarred an exhausting 24-hour trip to London into a busy weekend of work back in Glasgow in order to catch Karin Dreijer Andersson's "last ever" show in her Fever Ray guise, at the Forum, in Kentish Town. If the career of Barbra Streisand has taught the world nothing else, however, it is to always to take such pronouncements with a hefty dose of sodium chloride, so it was no more than a limited-impact shock when "public demand" saw to it that Fever Ray would play a small cutch of dates this summer, one of them being her first-ever Scottish date, at the looming former cinema space of the ABC.
Following a support set from Zola Jesus that did a lot more for me than her rather underwhelming show at the far smaller Captain's Rest venue two nights previously, Andersson and four-piece band took to the stage enveloped in dry ice and surrounded, as they were for last year's shows, by an array of flashing lampshades, lending the scene the air of an unexpectedly avant-garde Habitat commercial. The menacing chug of "If I Had a Heart" again kicked things off, before giving way to album favourites "Triangle Walks," "Concrete Walls" and "Seven"; the latter augmented by new guitar lines absent last year.
Photo credit: Alex Woodward
Sometime during this opening stretch the dry ice cleared enough to allow us a first unobstructed view of the band's costumes: Dreijer Andersson clad in black and labouring under a colossal item of headwear that trod the oft-neglected territory between giant space insect and slightly feminised Easter Island head; the rest of the band sporting grotesque facial prosthetics recalling nothing so much as the queasy pensioners of Harmony Korine's film Trash Humpers. One (male) band member's ensemble was completed by a tartan maxi-skirt and white blouse; another carried a tribal staff; another had a sword protruding from his back.
It almost seems a truism to report that musically, this show, from one of the few real virtuosos of the age, was a triumph. The ABC's sound system and acoustics seemed better suited than the Forum's to the bowel-troubling low frequencies that come standard at a live Fever Ray show, and, for the most part, the assembled synths, laptops and banks of percussion were mixed deftly enough to make them the perfect palette for the part-machine wonder of Andersson's modulated vocals. Only two "new" tracks were added to the eleven played last year, both of them covers, with her echoing take on Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street" arriving mid-set and a version of Vashti Bunyan's short, gorgeous "Here Before" teeing up the spare keys, haunting chants and ritualistic drums of show closer "Coconut." A genius of singing, songwriting, musicianship and pure stage theatre, Karin Dreijer Andersson has it all, and as long as the results are like this she's welcome to tease us with as many "farewell tours" as she likes.