- “We all want something better” could be the defining mantra of Jenny Hval’s extensive discography; if you wanted to boil it down so reductively, which you might do if you’re desperately searching for a solid foundation to stand on in her surreal, ever-melting worlds. You might also want to ask, much as she does herself, exactly what she means by “something better”.
Seven albums in and to look only at its most recent excesses, her recording career is carried along by a string of personal apocalypses, time-travelling, menstrual vampires and an endless recombination of styles between the extremes of experimentation, goth, metal and the syrupy sweet frostings of pop and dance; Hval’s questing spirit keeps at its hallucinogenic hunt. Reaching into the weirdness she has fearlessly pulled apart the insides of her own being and investigated the voids between herself and others, tracing the tenuous ligaments of flesh and mind, sketching embarrassing, failing bodies and uncomfortable sex scenes.
The roaring, wild gesture of 2016’s Blood Bitch, was -for all its jagged experimentalism and furious emotion- one of her most conceptually rigorous collections: all the ideas and questions of the record connected into a kind of road-map to the psychotic prospect of being a woman, trying to exist in the world. That seemed to exhaust Hval’s desire to express it all in words, given the evidence of the following EP, The Long Sleep. The modest, mid-2018 release was a much more gentle musical moment, giving in to tiredness even as Hval railed against the great difficulties of really communicating “There should be something I could tell you, there should be something I could say directly without lyrics and melody.” Finally she was magnanimous: “I just want to say: Thank you. I love you.”
Of course she had every reason to be exhausted, with all the work she’d been doing on her forthcoming debut as a novelist, coming to fruition shortly thereafter. Titled Paradise Rot, it’s an intensely surreal exploration of moving to a new place, starting a new relationship and transforming, house, partner and all, into a mushroom garden. Whether she has worked until her body disintegrated into a cloud of spores or not, Jenny Hval is back, less than a year later with another full-length record, The Practice Of Love. It appears to take some of its musical cues from The Long Sleep, inasmuch as it is comparatively gentle, unthreatening. It’s quite dance-oriented, more so than anything I’ve heard from Hval before and it’s also unabashedly old-fashioned. The album’s accompanying presser goes as far as to describe it as sounding like a “forgotten mid-’90’s trance single.” There are momentary snatches of that, but fortunately it’s not usually so vapid, more often offering echoes of something like old Lamb records, recent, darker Robyn material, or even Grimes.
Whatever else you might say The Practice Of Love definitely a quieter ride than you’d have a right to expect. It may also smooth the edges of Hval’s continuing philosophical project, but I don’t know how much you can ever really sugar that pill. It just wouldn’t be Hval if she wasn’t engaged in a rigorous intellectual endeavour. Right from the beginning she and her musical companions are still asking the big questions: “Where is god?” inquires the ‘pagan song’ of opener Lions as it examines the landscape, its leaves, moisture and fungus - a segue from the transformative journey of Paradise Rot. Elsewhere that journey becomes unmoored, plunging with the beats, through time, as in the symbolic hallucinations and rabbit-hole tumbling of High Alice or the vague, dreamlike premonitions of intertwined death and sex in Ashes To Ashes.
There’s slightly fewer of Hval’s characteristic spoken-word interludes, with a few exceptions, the most notable of which is the album’s title track, where Hval discusses her dissatisfaction with the idea of ‘love’ and its personal associations with a brutal, unforgiving sense of honesty, sorrow and again, death. Mid-tract it becomes entangled with Laura Jean, explaining how aging and childlessness mutates her experience of the human condition and her presumed place within it. Even as the words career over the top of each other, there’s a strange intersection between the ideas: a different idea of love as something unsettling, not commonly appreciated but fundamental and powerful. Jenny Hval might be discombobulated, spinning end over end on her strange odyssey -she might even have embraced the simple sweet consolations of pop- but she’s never going to accept the easy answers.
The something better she pieces together across the course of this record, The Practice Of Love, is shot through with dark skeins of death, uneasy desire and the undignified realities of life. There’s not a chance it’s what you were expecting and is it something better? The question still writhes unsettlingly, but that’s for you to struggle with now and into the future. In one final, trite reduction I can at least say this: Jenny Hval may indeed have found love out on the dancefloor.
- Chris Cobcroft.