“Pagan Poetry” is the second single from Björk’s Vespertine, her fourth album and a bit of a musical departure from previous records. The album features a lot of sounds assembled from unusual instruments, most notably music boxes. This song is pretty representative of the more subdued sound of the record.

Her New Knife are a Philadelphia-based indie rock band whose sound is often described as shoegaze. However, that descriptor that will not prepare you at all for this new Björk cover of theirs. It is not remotely shoegaze, it’s weirder than that.

The original stars with a harp melody and when her voice comes in, there is a pretty insistent, simple bassline. Her Knew Knife echo the opening harp part with detuned guitar but that bassline never comes in to anchor the song. Instead, lead vocalist Edgar Atencio’s voice just floats over top of the various guitar parts that come in and out of the mix, only occasionally fully playing the harp part. The backing vocals are relatively familiar if you

Some distant percussion joins part way through the track before giving way to a spanish guitar-esque break with Atencio’s voice even more unmoored than before. More instruments return as the cover builds towards the final refrain. Much like in the original, the lead vocal for the refrain is A Capella first before backing vocals and instrumentation join it. It is only at this point there is the tiniest bit of bass.

Never does the track once approach the gentleness of the original, nor does it ever approach the noise conjured by the term “shoegaze.” Instead, everything but that one acoustic guitar is frail and brittle. And the whole performance sounds like it could completely fall apart at any moment.