Classic Objects by Jenny Hval
Because Jenny Hval ably forms albums around concepts that are at once visceral and intellectual—the intersection of capitalism with sex and violence on 2013’s Innocence Is Kinky; the combination of horror-movie overtones, vampirism, and menstruation on 2016’s Blood Bitch—she provokes emotions … and ruminations about why those emotions exist.
The Norwegian singer-songwriter turns more toward the everyday on her latest solo LP, Classic Objects, which doesn’t make her songs any less intensely unusual. Hval eschews conventional rhyme schemes, and she’ll move from sketching a picture of a place she lived, or a place she performed, to reciting French philosophy or simulating what might be a dog’s eager identification of things it sniffs during a walk.
Notwithstanding Hval’s literary skills—“Now you go to the afterlife/You’ve heard good things about it,” from “Cemetery of Splendour,” is one among many quotable lines on Classic Objects—her music can be as diaphanously silky as a veil or as clarifying as a suddenly focused zoom lens.
The music is almost always immersive, too: the title track builds on increasingly forceful bongos and gleaming synths; “Year of Love” shakes its hips to rhythms from multiple Caribbean traditions; and, in about eight minutes, “Jupiter” glides from soothing indie-pop verses to menacingly bright choruses and onward to an elongated coda of thrumming electronics, whispers, heavy breathing, and crackling transmission waves.
Not unlike the lyrics, Hval’s voice slips into the textures of the music, sometimes blending in, sometimes contrasting like hot pink on jet black. Comparisons to other vividly personal and intelligent female singer-songwriters are easy—Tori Amos, Kate Bush and Golden Palominos alum Lori Carson come to mind—but she’s as different from them as they are from each other.
It’s better to say that Classic Objects adds a simpler, if not simple, dimension to Jenny Hval’s artistry. She never stops thinking; yet she never stops feeling, either.
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