The Norwegian artist presents her most unified mind-body work to date, melody-filled art-pop that deals with the nature of self and the freedom of the unconscious.
Let’s begin with the song “American Coffee,” a drink about which Jenny Hval has some thoughts. She presents herself nearly naked on the song as she surfs through details about her life. She begins before her own birth, empathizing with her frightened pregnant mother and sharing a memorable cinema experience. It’s a stunning piece of music to hear from Hval. Naturally, the Norwegian interdisciplinary artist who’s defined her music with questions about gender, sex, bodies, and power, bucks the standards of glimmery pop-ballad confessionals, singing airily about her UTI and the bloody urine she observes in a movie theater toilet.
Hval’s work is often informed by her bodily preoccupations: the self-care theses of Apocalypse, girl, the sanguinary sensibility of Blood Bitch. Her frank disposition in discussing the messy and painful realities of physical existence neutralizes their unique discomforts. Hval takes a new angle on Classic Objects, her most unified mind-body work to date. She makes a Möbius strip of having a deep understanding of herself: paradoxically, that finely tuned self-awareness can make deviations from that baseline feel all the more destabilizing, whether that’s pinpointing a urinary tract infection or identifying a sense of alienation from mainstream culture.
In an accompanying statement for Classic Objects, Hval explained that the album came out of wondering “what ‘just me’ could mean.” After releasing Menneskekollektivet under the Lost Girls moniker with Håvard Volden last year, she found her life upended and eerily still with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Feeling plain made me want to write something really straightforward,” she continued. To that end, Classic Objects is direct and personal in a way that Hval’s work has rarely been, even as she evades confessional tropes. The album is soft and loose throughout, never spiking with dissonance. The pops and snaps of hands on drum heads give the songs a distinctly fleshy feel. It’s as if Hval is handling herself with a gentle touch as she interrogates who she is and who she seems to be.
Hval works through her introspection openly, and the desert imagery that appears in and around Classic Objects fits the warping feeling of determining a sense of self: everything seems wide open, but how close are you to where you think you want to be? Building from the free-flowing hymn that opens “American Coffee,” Hval wonders what kind of person she’d be if she hadn’t gotten a fine arts degree. She probes deeper into her personal growth, asking, “Who is she who faces her fears?” The burst of percussion and melody that redirects the song is celebratory and relaxed, with Hval considering the other Hvals she could’ve been and letting them pass without regret.
She plunges further into the divide between seeming and being on “Jupiter” and the album’s title track. On the former, she squares herself against the beige concrete corners of the Prada Marfa art installation in the West Texas desert. “I am an ‘abandoned project,’” she sings. The line recalls Lydia Davis’ singular “Tropical Storm,” with Hval offering a lightly funny reminder of the constant upkeep and occasional chaos of the corporeal form. But it also brings to mind the premise that Joan Jacob Brumberg presented in her 1998 book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, which examines the historical arc of pervasive messaging to girls about physical self-improvement. Hval further ponders material differences in “Classic Objects,” wondering whether the items in her hands are art or stuff, and how to kiss passive gold and marble
Within the confines of her humanity, Hval settles into the contradictory realities of her existence—among them, being a proud feminist and independent artistic woman who decided to marry a man. She recoils at being subjected to the “industrial-happiness complex,” as she puts it. “‘It’s just for contractual reasons,’ I explained,” she sings on “Year of Love,” with black jeans offered as another signifier of efforts to defang the proceedings. The song’s jumpy organ melody feels like a feverish calliope, as if the carousel of “The Circle Game” had somehow gone a little lopsided.
Hval’s perspective gradually expands outward across the record, shifting from small personal details to bigger-picture observations. The heady “Year of Sky” spins from the appeal of finding oneself back to losing it again, where time and place are temporary anchors to an infinite expanse, and Hval ponders the afterlife in “Cemetery of Splendour,” with a plodding, earthy bass tone that cedes to a long tail of a woodsy field recording. She takes inventory of her environment in a voice of breathy wonder—leaves, birds, cigarettes, gum! gum! gum!—illustrating her exterior world with lovely and ugly things alike.
From the harp-dappled lilt of “Freedom,” where she wonders about institutional promises, Hval builds toward the stormy, piano-driven finale of “The Revolution Will Not Be Owned.” She basks in the notion that an interior world is the only space where absolute unbridled freedom exists—even songs are subject to copyrights, as she sings. She frames dreaming as “the plan without the plan,” a carnival of unconsciousness. It’s here that the being and the seeming collapse into nothing, where it’s possible to be free of the world and all its impositions. Absolute freedom, Hval suggests, lies in the willful abandon of opening up to the wild possibilities of the interior. In the great conflicting unknown, pleasant surprises, profound revelations, and life-changing love abound.
0 comments:
Post a Comment