- -- Release information ----------------------------------------------- -- -
Artist : Jenny Hval
Album : Apocalypse, Girl
Genre : Pop
Year : 2015
Label : Su Tissue
Cat# : ST001CD
Source : CDDA
Bitrate : avg. 220kbps
Size : 61,71 MB
Runtime : 38:57
URL : http://jennyhval.com/
- -- Tracklist -------------------------------------------------------- -- -
01. Kingsize 02:25
02. Take Care of Yourself 03:03
03. That Battle is Over 04:36
04. White Underground 02:21
05. Heaven 04:54
06. Why This? 03:38
07. Some Days 00:42
08. Sabbath 03:50
09. Angels & Anaemia 03:28
10. Holy Land 10:00
- -- Release notes ---------------------------------------------------- -- -
"What is soft dick rock?" Jenny Hval asks, on "Kingsize," the
opening track of her new album, "Apocalypse, girl." She speaks
the phrase, and lingers over the consonants. The effect is
both comic and startlingùa vivid, abrupt deflation of the
machismo that has characterized so much of popular music: the
hip swivels, the bare-chested strutting, the guitars that
function as penis extensions or substitutes. Hval's question
arrives during a brief pause in an otherwise fidgety
arrangement, which includes snippets of synthesizer, the sound
of a bow being scraped across cello strings, and a series of
rattling noises, as if someone were rifling through a cutlery
drawer. The effect is to make the question feel balder, and
bolder.
The overlap of intimacy and unease is important to Hval; her
albums often begin there. "I arrived in town with an electric
toothbrush pressed against my clitoris," she announced, on the
first track of her 2011 record, "Viscera." Her next release,
"Innocence Is Kinky," from 2013, took off with a whispered
confession: "That night, I watched people fucking on my
computer." Hval's aim seems not to offend but to estrange,
creating distance between herself and the listener; her
narrators are unreliable but fascinating. Once she has opened
up that distance, she roams the breadth of it. The spoken
monologue of "Kingsize" unfolds somewhere between the
terrestrial world and a dream, and, as in dreams, sexual
symbols fuse with the bizarre. "I sing to the bananas," Hval
continues. "The skin is getting thin and brown."
Hval is a thirty-four-year-old Norwegian musician and writer,
and "Apocalypse, girl" is her third album under her own name;
she has also released two albums as Rockettothesky, and
recorded in various partnerships. Gender is a central theme in
her music: "Innocence Is Kinky" grew out of her work on a
sound installation, a response to images of women's faces that
were taken from sources including Paris Hilton's sex tape and
Carl Dreyer's silent film "The Passion of Joan of Arc." "The
camera is a mirror / But mine, not yours," Hval sings, on
"RenΘe Falconetti of OrlΘans." "Innocence Is Kinky" feels
brittle, moving from outbursts of electric guitar to spoken
word to eerie, pretty melodies that recall the occult chill of
PJ Harvey's album "White Chalk" (2007). (Hval's record was
produced by John Parish, Harvey's longtime collaborator.) Like
Harvey, Hval pursues two of the big themes, power and desire,
but where Harvey, especially on her early albums, seemed to
parody or role-play masculine bravado, Hval's music is far
less aggressive than her lyrics might suggest. As an answer to
the question "What is soft dick rock?," "Apocalypse, girl"
presents a kind of experimental folk music, which resists the
rhythmic and melodic efficienciesùor, one might say, the
conquestsùof chart pop in favor of something slower and more
irregular, with few hooks or choruses.
Hval has toured recently with Mike Hadreas (who performs as
Perfume Genius), another artist who isn't shy about
challenging gender conventions. In his songs, Hadreas details
the dangers that may confront gay men who express their
sexuality openly; sometimes he turns the tables, adopting with
pride the flamboyant queerness that bigots find threatening.
Hval, too, is interested in danger. What both artists describe
is the trouble and the pleasure experienced by people who
might be classified as unmanly: gay men, women, and, in Hval's
case, the rare straight man who "dares stay soft." "Can we go
there?" she sings, on "Take Care of Yourself." "We don't have
to fuck. Can we just lie here being?"
Hval is an artist of many questionsùthe ones she asks, and
those she provokes in the listener. "Apocalypse, girl" swerves
from decipherable politics to recondite personal imagery. It's
not a paraphrasable album, but it is a listenable one, its
avant-garde tendencies held in check by Hval's beguiling
voice, and by instrumentation that accrues in layers. Nine
musicians are listed in the album credits, playing keyboards,
harp, and mellotron, among other things, but the instruments
tend to blur together, as do the songs, which flow into one
another without pause. Hval's voice is high, and, though her
melodies don't seem fixed, she sounds assured, as if she
trusts where she's headed. "I want to sing religiously," she
sings, on a track called "Heaven." She ventures into the realm
of unembarrassed feeling, letting her voice curl upward to the
limit of her register, glorying in the sound and the momentum
of her words as much as in their meaning. "Heaven" builds to a
crescendo, with percussion crashes and harp trills; if this is
the music of apocalypse, it's quite lovely.
"Apocalypse, girl" wanders through the fallout of the twenty-
first century without ever quite arriving at a showdown.
"Statistics and newspapers tell me I am unhappy and dying,"
Hval sings, on "That Battle Is Over," against the warm chords
of a mellotron. Her tone is wry, though it soon turns piqued.
"And it's biology, it's my own fault," she continues, an
exasperated reply to the media's frequent exhortation of
women: Improve, improve, improve! If you don't, you've got
only yourself to blame. The album cover is a harshly lit
photograph of a woman slumped over an exercise ball; it looks
as if she's been murdered, but perhaps she's just given up.
For this album, Hval drew on the film "Safe," from 1995, which
was directed by Todd Haynes. The parallels are both visual
(that cover shot, which, like the film, evokes a quietly
threatening space between external violence and personal
surrender) and thematic. In one scene, the lead character,
Carol White, a wealthy Los Angeles housewife (played by
Julianne Moore), who has mysteriously become ill, fails to
complete an aerobics class. The film is set in 1987, and the
participants are dressed in high-cut leotards and pastel
leggings. They kick and clap, but Carol falls behind. Is her
failure her own fault, or is something killing her?
"Safe" shows a kind of apocalypse without a climax. There are
no weapons or explosions, just a woman suffering from vague
but pervasive allergies, gradually disintegrating. The film is
a portrait of Reagan-era narcissism, and Hval's album suggests
that we haven't travelled very far since then. "You say I'm
free now / That battle is over / And feminism's over," Hval
sings, on "That Battle Is Over." It is the most
straightforward pop song on the album, girded by a loping
drumbeat, but the lyrics form a scathing critique of political
indifference, and Hval's vocal could be heard as a spoof on
the vacuous good feeling that so many pop songs aim to create.
At full tilt, her melody line suggests enjoyment, but her
words don't. "Yeah, I say, I can consume what I want now," she
sings, and it sounds like a hollow victory.
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