the relevant ballads

the thing about fever ray

as noted before, karin dreijer andersson made my favorite album of 2009, and probably also my favorite show of 2009, and since i am never going to get more articulate about this than i am right this moment (or, rather, than i felt approximately 10 minutes ago while i was doing the dishes, listening to the knife’s opera about darwin, and contemplating how much karin dreijer is my heroine), it is time that i take some moments to yell into the ether about it.

one of the things i learned in the course of my english majordom was about performative speech: in english, the main example i can think of is “with this ring, i thee wed.” once it’s said, a transformation takes place. in the metro, in the dark, with fog machines spitting unrelentingly, the reverberating bass of “if i had a heart” felt like a performance in that sense. it was so loud and strange (it went on far longer than it does on the album) and unignorable. without that music, a woman dressing up like a skull or a haggard tree-nymph or a melty-faced ghoul is just a gimmick. with it, it’s more like magic. it’s the only time in recent memory that i have been frightened and awed by music. the show was literally dark, and the music is figuratively so; it’s disquieting like things that scared you as a kid, revisited when you’re not quite grown.

the thing about the performative voice is that there are so few opportunities to use it; there are no magic spells, no binding words that can’t be backspaced or undone. and the thing about that performance, and that album, is that they manage to make disguises and spells seem new and worth believing in. her voice changes and multiplies, and, in my favorite album track, “keep the streets empty” is a chant like something from a fairy tale. i picture my own deserted street in chicago at night vividly, preserving that emptiness, walking through it untouched. being frightened by music, without critical intercessions or ironic remove, seems a way to be braver against the horrifying stuff of dreams and the dull stuff of the ordinary day. it is important and potent and beautiful. it takes some getting used to, but then it’s love.