FEVER RAY Fever Ray Rabid****

Here comes the ice age again. Karin Dreijer Andersson is Fever Ray, a Swedish musician who knows what critical success is all about.

Andersson is also, with her brother Olof Dreijer, The Knife, whose crisp electronic pop has produced such albums as Silent Shout, and helped turn Jose Gonzalez into a star via his career-making cover of their Heartbeats. With The Knife on the sidelines for now, Andersson is making a solo run.

At first listen, Fever Ray doesn’t stray too far. You immediately clock the same Nordic melancholy, haunting atmospherics and moody electronic textures which The Knife have used to great effect. There’s also a similar sonic glacial drift and folky pop disposition to the songs. But Andersson’s beguiling, unruffled oddness draws you ever closer. You catch this in such off-kilter lyrics as “we talk about love/we talk about dishwasher tablets”, or in the compelling slow-motion sweep that anchors each track in a musical world where Kate Bush might be found fronting Kraftwerk.

For every groove buffed to a blinding minimal sheen, there are nods to classic synth-pop of the kind that never loiter beneath a spinning mirrorball. For every sombre, poker-faced line about the domestic grind (including perhaps the first reference on a pop record to how to care for house plants), there are hints of cracks in the facade and a sight of a human beneath it all. For all the austerity and focused sense of purpose, there are moments when you can sense the natural friction between (wo)man and machine.

At a time when icy synth-pop is again the height of fashion, Fever Ray reminds you, then, that style alone is no substitute for substance. www.myspace.com/ feverray JIM CARROLL

Download tracks: Dry Dusty, I'm Not Done, If I Had a Heart