The piano bench has become a refuge for idiosyncratic singer-songwriters like Regina Spektor, Tori Amos, and Nellie McKay, but even within this growing category, Swedish-born Frida Hyvönen stands out as uncategorizable. She defines herself by her quirks: Her songs, which are too dark and sexual to be labeled precious, take their convoluted metaphors a step or two too far, and her prose-poem lyrics often create verse lines with odd, sometimes amelodic meters. In general, she intimates a bohemian outlook and a self-consciousness that occasionally threatens to render her songs meta. In this regard, her debut, Until Death Comes, was slightly muted, as if she were unsure how to differentiate herself musically, but her follow-up, Silence Is Wild, sounds not only more assured in its arrangements and performances, but more lively for being so self-indulgent.
Hyvönen has gained an appreciation for enormity and melodrama. Big choruses convey big ideas, and her lyrics can be almost defiantly sentimental. Opener "Dirty Dancing" begins as a reminiscence of her first crush, then leaps forward to meeting him years later, their paths having diverged so completely that memories of playacting Dirty Dancing together are all they have in common. Throughout the verses, Hyvönen weaves in passages of "Be My Baby" (from that movie's soundtrack), and the paper-thin wall of sound on the outro is all the more affecting for being constructed from the materials at hand: voice, piano, and of course castanets.
"Enemy Within" shares that sense of theatricality, adding a choir and an enormous chorus. Too bad its lyrics sound so meaningless: "Stone on the bottom of the ocean says I know this is not a cul-de-sac." The tangled metaphor of "Highway 2 U", in which Hyvönen literally says she's not afraid to flip off the cops on the figurative road to romance, is easier to forgive, as the song's palpable sexual tension and her wordless howls make that sentiment come across as feverishly unguarded. These songs may seem elaborate, but Hyvönen is only working with a handful of elements. Her small, unobtrusive band gives the ABBA-meets-Fleetwood Mac "Scandinavian Blonde" and the city ode "London!" an excited urgency, Ida Lundén's synths lend texture and character to a handful of tracks, and though "Oh Shanghai" has some gongs and percussion, it's the orchestrated exception to the rule.
That big-yet-basic sound is just another of Hyvönen's quirks, hinting at something dark and insoluble threading through these songs. She knows she's a bit different from the rest of the world, and that self-awareness gives a song like "My Cousin" added impact: As strings swirl quietly around her, Hyvönen realizes she and her man aren't the marrying kind ("we live outside the realms of yes and no" is how she puts it), but wants to find her own equivalent measure of love and security. One suggests itself on "December", a stoic number with a melancholy piano theme that describes their trip to an abortion clinic. His mere presence, bringing her coffee and a sandwich and offering support, might be measure enough, but she says she can taste the "last breath of our love" in his kiss. Whether the song is strictly autobiographical is beside the point. That Hyvönen sings about such matters on Silence Is Wild is brave enough, but that she does so with such a complicated sense of generous affection and self-preserving detachment truly sets her apart.
