JENNY HVAL
The Practice Of Love SACRED BONES
8/10
ON her six albums to date, Norway’s Jenny Hval has ranted and ruminated across a broad spectrum of gender politics, religion, patriarchy, menstruation, sexualised female bodies, “capitalist clit” and “soft dick rock”. Her sonic explorations have been similarly promiscuous, expanding her indie electro-folk palette with wild swerves into avant-metal, noise-punk, free jazz and more. Like a post-laptop Patti Smith, her stream-of-consciousness lyrics are often raw and rude and bristling with carnal energy. And her wild interdisciplinary live shows are something else again, occupying a performance-art space somewhere between Peaches and Cindy Sherman.
But Hval dials down the art-punk attitude on her latest album, stepping back from visceral lust and disgust to map out a more contemplative midlife overview of intimacy, empathy, social connection and female creativity. Blending her vocals with spoken-word contributions from various friends and fellow artists – Vivian Wang, Félicia Atkinson and Laura Jean Englert – she creates a communal chorus of narrators, a sly shift away from the egocentric focus that drives most singer-songwriter music.
Most strikingly, The Practice Of Love relocates Hval’s febrile stylistic wanderlust firmly within a more soothing envelope of rippling soft synths and pulsing trance-pop rhythms. This mellifluous makeover is partly a self-conscious retro-rave homage to the Eurodance sound that Hval only experienced tangentially in her youth, but also partly a fruitful repurposing of that underrated, oft-derided genre’s warm-blooded emotional charms. The distant echoes of Robyn and the Pet Shop Boys here are as delicious as they are deliberate.
A collaboration
