Frida Hyvönen is a Swedish pianist with a bent for twinkling flurries of notes slamming into clanging, chunky chords-- periodic ticks of dissonance tucked into harmonies. Like her piano playing, her voice is capable of almost spontaneous dynamic magic. Sometimes she howls; other times she performs in a near-whisper. Those are sufficient conditions for success as a performer and, possibly, as a songwriter, but people keep wanting to find more in her songs, like panaceas for whatever they feel is ailing American pop or Erica Jong novels condensed into a pretty two-minute ellipsis.
Hyvönen is complicit, if not culpable, in being taken either as a cute pop songbird or a feminist newcomer: She sings about cocks against thighs, homoerotic encounters, and one-night stands with candor and ease. She's just writing songs. But remember: She's a (European) (female) (piano-playing) songwriter who mentions Djuna Barnes, and this must be construed as statement of an ideologue unafraid to be naughty. Indeed, perhaps a female songwriter talking about the male anatomy and controlling her own sexuality would still be a valid critical point if, say, the last 60 years of recorded music-- from Mabel Scott's "Baseball Boogie" of 1950 ("Get your bat ready, baby/ If you can hit that ball, you can make a home run") to Missy Elliott (You fill in the blanks)-- didn't exist.
Such a contextualized stance, after all, directly dismisses the album's real strengths and weaknesses. Hyvönen's an intelligent arranger; her turns on "The Modern"-- the album's meta-crux, where she works to change the framework of affection, from its linguistic attachments to its mother-as-shelter constraints-- are brilliant, an up-down, merry-go-round keyboard countered by a springy piano that pokes fun at the main line's institutional insistence. Hyvönen sings a double round with herself on the chorus, two affected vocal takes-- like Björk stuck inside of a Victrola's horn-- crossing against each another. The brilliantly petulant "You Never Got Me Right" sees Hyvönen decide it was her lover who was wrong, not her, all in two minutes. By the end, she's screaming. She harmonizes with herself and a trumpet on the sole full-band track, "Come Another Night," a sunny daydream plucked from Stuart Murdoch's brow. But Hyvönen occasionally misses: "N.Y."-- a big, bright-lights ballad fit for the arena, built on arbitrarily outdated imagery-- over-rings the longing bell.
That's OK, though, as Until Death Comes is a record about growing up and toiling through excitement and ennui. It's not a statement of philosophy as much as it is a realization of complete loneliness, the kind of void that can preside even when friends are around: Until Death Comes opens with the impetuous, indecisive "I Drive My Friend", Hyvönen's faintly multi-tracked monotone lamenting the longest short drive of her life. Her lover is riding shotgun, and she's taking him to the airport, trying to convince herself she has the strength to let him go. The upbeat regularity of her piano is mimetic of her car tires clicking over cracks in the asphalt, a rhythmically fast charge to a slow and painful defeat. Later, with the perfect "Today, Tuesday", she exploits that consequent void, letting on that she's been counting the days spent by herself. An expected season of snow leaves her fretful for her future. It's a quintessential coming-of-age moment, Hyvönen refraining, "Do they remember the shape of my plan?" moments before forgetting exactly where the right keys are. It's not unique, even if it's from a diminutive, pretty Scandinavian blonde who plays piano like a panther.
