There’s something in the woodshed. It’s Fever Ray and she’s out to scare you.

The story of the Knife wound round the back waters of the early 00′s until their track Heartbeats, covered by their friend Jose Gonzalez, made them a reluctant tributary to the mainstream. The rush of interest in the band had everyone declaring them a superlative voice in the burgeoning electro scene. Distant, immune to the calls of the media, and always masked in photographs, they declared they weren’t interested in live music – the synthetic was precisely where they were at and where they would stay.

But when the big cheque books come out, it takes someone very wealthy or foolish to knock back the bucks. They were neither and much to everyone’s surprise they toured. And it was after this experience that it seems Karin, the sister in the band, fell in love with singing.

With a head full of songs, and brother Olof out in South American jungles collecting material for a new opera they’re writing based on evolution, Fever Ray crept out from behind the curtain.

Unremixed, Fever Ray isn’t music you can dance to. It has such gravity and gloom that lovers of Portishead and early Massive Attack will take to it like a black swans to an oil slick. This is a world of distorted growling vocals, often processed to sound like a man’s voice (a frequent element in the Knife’s sound). On some tracks where these monstrous vocals oppose Karin’s natural singing voice, you have a feeling of sinister forces setting about an innocent. That or a sharply fractured internal struggle.

It seems it’s not only the brother with a taste for jungle rhythms, as the album’s beats pivot on a tension-line between woody, natural percussive sounds and cold, steel-tipped electronic waves. You’d almost bet it was Karin and not Olof that’d been out on an ethnomusicological binge

And the midnight jungle theme also resonates in the first video from the project, which has been skulking about the web since December. In “If I Had A Heart” the flicker of a single torch lights the vast droning darkness of low synths and croaking vocals of the video’s opening sequence. Voodoo, dead bodies, and scared children complete the unfathomable macabre tale.

There’s little let up from this heavy fog, and for some this will make the landscape of the album too lacking in relief of either kind. Apart from a couple of bizarre domestic references to watering plants and dishwasher tablets, a slight surprise comes in the bass line of the final track, Coconut, with a characteristic dub pattern that hits your ears, and almost your feet. But not quite. For it’s difficult to describe Fever Ray without bumping into unpleasant words like “ambient” and “trance” even “world”, which is enough to make anyone shiver. And I half expect that’s the point.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBAzlNJonO8[/youtube]

‘If I Had a Heart’ – the first track from Fever Ray’s self-titled debut album