On “Mephisto in the Water”, a standout off her second solo album for Rune Grammofon, the Norwegian singer/songwriter/novelist/critic/academic/provocateur Jenny Hval bends her voice into unusual and unexpected shapes. Over a disquieting Möbius strip keyboard line, she performs a wordless fanfare, sing-chants the verses, and splits into a choir of singers on the vocal hook. “Hey, what do you hear?” she asks coyly. On the protracted bridge, her voice warps and mutates and turns the syllables into pure sounds. Hval goes deliberately flat, savoring the pulsating dissonance, until all that is left is a high, tensile note that wavers in either distress or desire. Rather than alienating, it’s actually inviting: a strange and powerful performance. Innocence Is Kinky thrives on such moments, when Hval’s primary instrument sounds like it’s disentangling itself from her body and swooping around the ether of the song.
First under the stage name Rockettothesky and later under her real name, Hval has been a mainstay in the Oslo scene for several years now, but little in her catalog-- which includes a handful of albums as well as two novels, several sound installations, and a master’s thesis on Kate Bush-- signaled the breakthrough she makes on Innocence Is Kinky. In the past her music has tended toward subdued art-pop, full of plaintive beats and hushed vocals; at her best such subtlety was commanding, even if it occasionally threatened to settle for decorous passivity. The new album, as that title suggests, is more direct, more brazen, more aggressive, more provocative, both conceptually and musically. Recording with producer John Parish, Hval explores some enormous, unwieldy concepts that tend to pop up more often in textbooks than on turntables.
Opening with Hval watching internet porn and closing with her discovering a new way to inhabit her body, Innocence Is Kinky examines thorny issues of gender identity and commodified sexuality. She gives her songs titles like “Death of the Author” and “Amphibious, Androgynous”. Mythological figures wander in and out of these songs: Mephisto does his best Ophelia, Oedipus blindly wanders the streets of Oslo, and Pinnochio takes communion. By far the most significant figure among these songs is also the most human: Renée Falconetti, the silent-film star whose close-up in 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the most indelible images in the history of cinema. “The camera is a mirror, but mine, not yours,” Hval sings as an organ thrums in the background and a low bass note pulses on the downbeat.
She’s obviously having a blast throwing these figures and narratives against one another, and her irreverence suggests a playfulness that dispels any hint of pretension. Yet, she keeps the focus squarely on her commanding vocals, which means you don’t need to know Carl Theodor Dreyer from Laura Mulvey to appreciate this album. In fact, the most fascinating ideas on Innocence Is Kinky are the musical ones. While rooted in the same art-pop as Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, and pre-“Sledgehammer” Peter Gabriel, Hval paints with a broad palette, not only deploying an array of sounds and styles but setting them against each other to create jarring juxtapositions. As “Mephisto in the Water” fades to its close, a few raw guitar chords introduce the stomping psych-pop of “I Called”. “Oslo Oedipus” opens with a Middle Eastern chorale, layered moans swaddled in reverb, before transitioning into a poetry recitation set to a clangorous beat. Based on a sound installation called “A Continuous Echo of Splitting Hymens”, “Give Me That Sound” is composed of belches of frazzled distortion and bent vocals that make for an arresting interlude before Hval launches into “I Got No Strings”, the album’s truest rock song. The seams between the songs speak as loudly as the songs themselves, giving the album the shape of a journey. It’s less a critical essay than a picaresque: a woman leaving the dirty white glare of her computer and wandering around Oslo.
Ultimately, the album’s heady diversity originates in Hval’s malleable voice, which alters style, approach, timber, and tone from one measure to the next. One moment she addresses the listener in a slyly conspiratorial whisper, as if to draw you into her curious world. The next, she lets loose a full-throated wail that shakes that world apart. Not content to merely test the limitations of musical genre, of sound, of her own voice (and, by virtue, her body), Hval knowingly transgresses those limitations as she explores what’s just beyond her range. That bold tack gives Innocence Is Kinky its unique aesthetic, but it is also, oddly enough, what keeps the music so grounded in the physical and the human.
