Last month, two scheduled appearances in Paris by the Swedish organist and singer-songwriter Anna von Hausswolff were canceled for a reason that, in our era of pandemic closures and right-wing hysteria about censorship, seems quaint: satanic panic. Von Hausswolff brings a religious sense of ceremony to her operatically heavy music, whether she’s pummeling a single distorted chord into oblivion, swaggering and soaring through gothic rock songs, or spinning long passages of ominous drone. She often performs and records in churches, on room-filling pipe organs. The Paris gigs had drawn a crowd of fundamentalist Catholic protesters to block the doors of the Notre-Dame de Bon-Port church, evidently riled up by a lyric from Von Hausswolff’s 2010 song “Pills”: “I made love with the devil.”
Yves Trocheris, the priest who made the decision to cancel, admirably defended von Hausswolff, making clear that he was acting out of concern for public safety and not because he agreed with the fundamentalists. Still, his straight-faced denial of her supposed satanism carried some unintentional humor. Listening to von Hausswolff’s new live album, you might not disagree with the protesters about the wild and dark forces swirling within this music. There is something threateningly subversive about performing it in institutions with histories of rigidness and repression—but maybe raising a little hell isn’t such a bad thing.
Live at Montreux Jazz Festival was recorded in 2018, during an electrifying ensemble performance of material drawn from Dead Magic and The Miraculous, von Hausswolff’s two latest records at the time. The setlist makes Live at Montreux an ideal introduction to her work for anyone drawn in by 2020’s breakthrough All Thoughts Fly, her fifth album and first for Southern Lord, which set aside her commanding vocals and backing band in favor of stormy solo organ instrumentals. Like Nick Cave, for whom she was opening that night in Montreux, von Hausswolff is a rakishly charismatic singer, with an air of menace that seems sincere and playful at once. She pairs this theatrical expressiveness with old-school vocal virtuosity, as likely to stun you with a melodic leap as she is with a turn from pristine bel canto to rock’n’roll growl.
Live at Montreux charts a rough trajectory from one pole of von Hausswolf’s songwriting style to the other. Opener “The Truth, the Glow, the Fall” is the closest thing to pop, a tale of a doomed relationship set to a deceptively bubbly organ ostinato. Closer “Come Wander With Me/Deliverance” is a 15-minute barrage, with doom metal riffs and passages of noisy free improv downshifting suddenly into chord changes that would sound at home in a Romantic-era symphony. The misty tunefulness of the former mode splits the difference between Cave's murder ballads and Kate Bush's art-pop fantasias; the Wagnerian rumble of the latter is more akin to Swans or Neurosis. Von Hausswolff and her band—guitars, bass, drums, percussion, synth, pipe organ—deliver both sides of their music with thrilling high drama and careful attunement to subtleties of harmony and arrangement. Even the ambient-leaning sections move purposefully, with each new layer added or subtracted pushing the whole somewhere new.
Von Hausswolff is no nostalgist, but there is a throwback appeal to her treatment of the rock concert as an ambitious and occasionally solemn spectacle. In addition to the more direct reference points, Live at Montreux also recalls, in a roundabout way, recordings like Tangerine Dream’s Ricochet and Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii, weed-scented live totems of the 1970s that gave the sense of the musicians as wizards and the stage as their conjuring ground. There’s nothing ironic about the music’s foreboding heaviness, but it does have a sense of mischief. You can practically hear von Hausswolff smiling as she slips into a vaguely demonic register during the opening section of “The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra,” turning an otherwise mundane line—“My feet are not enough”—into an unholy incantation. The climax of “Ugly and Vengeful” involves passages of overwhelming density and dissonance juxtaposed with largely unaccompanied vocal runs. The band gears up for a moment before slamming back in each time, like a supervillain gleefully brandishing torture devices before administering them.
Though Live at Montreux is an inviting survey for newcomers, it's also worth hearing if you’re already familiar with the source material. Some songs, like “Pomperipossa,” are reworked for maximum force, but the greatest rewards are subtler: the delicacy of the drum fills in “The Truth, the Glow, the Fall,” the way the band pauses for breath before the coda of “The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra,” or shifts the harmonies of its chorus by changing a single note. Next time von Hausswolff rolls through Paris, those angry Catholics should give her a chance. Her music may be devilish, but it isn’t without grace.
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