Jenny Hval
Iris Silver Mist
4AD
No one has ever accused Norwegian songwriter and novelist (and occasional Lost Girl) Jenny Hval of working within convention. Inspired by the likes of Laurie Anderson and Kate Bush without sounding at all like either, Hval prefers experimentation over easy explanation, and has turned the most symmetrical of her compositions and hushed vocal musings into wordy, knotty, pretzel-esque bits that still manage to be open and airy (or at least open-ended, without any real conclusions—maybe I mean churro-esque).
Bringing up food here has its point, as Hval based her new album Iris Silver Mist on past concerts of hers where she lined rice cookers across her stage to fill the room with the scent of hominess, then factored in a perfume (for which the record takes its name) with which to present a series of warm and familiar atmospheres. The result is something pleasant, even plush and luscious, to go with her occasionally horrid and hilarious musings (“You had bled through your jeans” is a particularly sharp lyric) and psycho-poli-social critiques.
In fact, rather than keep scent and sense in separate boxes, Hval throws everything smelly together, and links it all to her performative arts. The handsomely poetic, Gertrude Stein–ish “To Be a Rose” is bold and brassy, quite literally and figuratively, as it ties the smoke of cigarettes and the dew of flowers to her childhood with the thunder of a hundred trumpets. “I Want to Start at the Beginning” allows Hval something meatier and meta while rhapsodizing about hamburgers in connection to home, to her past, and things juicier and warmer, with muscle and fat and texture and resistance to them.
Though she shifts her emphasis to art and the role of the performer on “I Don’t Know What Free Is” and “The Artist Is Absent,” Hval still luxuriates in and gorges on experience (“Exhale me with your cigarette smoke / Like you gave me life”) as if she’s eaten a great and gorgeous meal. And now I’m hungry.
