Review Summary: If there's one thing I learned from listening to this album, it's that ironic sexism is still sexism.
Innocence is Kinky, Jenny Hval’s second offering for Rune Grammofon, finds the Norwegian artist itching for reinvention once again. She previously displayed similar leanings on 2011’s
Viscera, which was a conscious departure from the reluctant pop of
To Sing Me Apple Trees and the sibilant, ethereal music of
Medea. But it’s not all uncharted territory from here on out – while
Viscera saw Hval digging deep within herself to craft six-to-eight minute epics that came together synergically to deliver the album’s central thesis,
Innocence instead sees a return to standard song lengths, with most of the record’s cuts not even breaking the four-minute marker. That’s not to say that Hval’s fourth record feels brief though, for its dense lyricism and difficult, often Spartan arrangements do require considerable amounts of patience to crack.
If you just joined us on this tour of Hval/Rockettothesky’s discography, it’s worth mentioning that the cuts on
Innocence often feel less like songs than sketches of poetry – think Brian Eno’s recent work with poet Rick Holland and you’d have a rough idea of the format in which pieces like “Oslo Oedipus” and “I Called” present themselves. But while Eno and Holland’s work had a sort of everyday immediacy to it, Hval is a scribe whose multivarious allusions frequently demand a significant degree of literacy, and her deceptively timid vocals belie an intimidating poetic voice. Describing the
sound of a Jenny Hval record can also be another beast entirely. Imagine, if you will, the urgency of Zola Jesus’ wrecked-torch narratives, intermixed with the self-cognizance of Grimes’ recent sojourn into cyborg pop plus a dash of
w h o k i l l-era tUnE-yArDs’ inobdurate fanaticism, and you’d be pretty close to tapping into the sounds of
Innocence is Kinky.
Elsewhere, Hval’s own website gives us some additional insight into the motivation behind her recent revisionist tendencies. In touring
Viscera around various clubs and festivals throughout Europe and Australia, she frequently found herself wanting to get more and more aggressive on stage with the material, desiring to play louder each time instead of shushing down and working with polite, acoustic soundscapes. “I wanted to sing louder, channel this energy, sharpen all edges, loosen the structures,” she writes, and this is probably where the inspiration for a song like the title track comes from. On “Innocence is Kinky”, a spindly guitar riff performs dissonant cartwheels around Hval’s vocals, which reach their peak with a desperate, singular plea against sexual depravity: “There has to be more than burning and losing myself!” she begs. It's hard not to sit up and take notice, particularly in light of the ominous manner in which the song’s opening lines names the entire audience as co-conspirators to the crime of voyeurism: “That night, I watched people fucking on my computer/
Nobody can see me looking anyway.”
Then there’s “Mephisto in the Water”, which has such a joyful vitality that it wouldn’t seem entirely out of place for the Von Trapp children to perform a cover rendition of it. Here, Hval’s gossamer-tipped vocals brush lightly over an unabashed pastoral paean that seemingly dissolves into thin air after three and a half minutes. It’s a startling about-turn from the bumpy and unforgiving nature of the title track, and the contrast merely serves to underscore the poignancy of the artist’s message. Hval has also noted that
Innocence carries the mark of her recent obsessions with the concept of an enforced male position, naming the work of perennial bad boys Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld, and a certain Michael Gira as particularly strong influences. It’s probably no small coincidence, then, that there’s a song called “The Seer” on here, with some of its lines – like “The voice is a second flesh/That cannot be seen/This body is not for vision” – probably more than capable of finding a home on a Swans record somewhere. “Renée Falconetti of Orléans” in turn finds Hval attempting to bridge the disconnect between love and blunt, senseless fornication. “It is an act of love,” she tells herself. “He enters you through your body/His voice is an act of love/Like holy water.” But she never once sounds completely convinced.
Given that the bulk of Jenny Hval’s work has typically been about the female form and the manner in which its sexuality is often circumvented in popular culture,
Innocence is thematically similar to much of her canon. As before, bodies are frequently painted as disposable utilities, even when sexuality is not necessarily the locus of a given track – “I want to sing like a continuous echo of splitting hymens,” goes one particularly memorable line on “Give Me That Sound”, which in truth spends most of its time symbolizing Hval’s ongoing search for her own voice via a continuum of gritty, delay-soaked reverb. Much like “Give Me That Sound”,
Innocence is Kinky is difficult to listen to, and even harder to stomach. But there is great reward in focusing on what happens in this deceptively hushed landscape that Hval has built, because for all its use of soft atmospherics and gentle, eiderdown-laced vocals, the album ultimately betrays the implication of a lifetime of objectification beneath its soothing dulcet tones and restrained palettes. As Hval herself pronounces on “The Seer”: “My body is the end.”
