“What is soft dick rock?” Jenny Hval asks, on “Kingsize,” the opening track of her new album, “Apocalypse, girl.” She speaks the phrase, and lingers over the consonants. The effect is both comic and startling—a vivid, abrupt deflation of the machismo that has characterized so much of popular music: the hip swivels, the bare-chested strutting, the guitars that function as penis extensions or substitutes. Hval’s question arrives during a brief pause in an otherwise fidgety arrangement, which includes snippets of synthesizer, the sound of a bow being scraped across cello strings, and a series of rattling noises, as if someone were rifling through a cutlery drawer. The effect is to make the question feel balder, and bolder.
The overlap of intimacy and unease is important to Hval; her albums often begin there. “I arrived in town with an electric toothbrush pressed against my clitoris,” she announced, on the first track of her 2011 record, “Viscera.” Her next release, “Innocence Is Kinky,” from 2013, took off with a whispered confession: “That night, I watched people fucking on my computer.” Hval’s aim seems not to offend but to estrange, creating distance between herself and the listener; her narrators are unreliable but fascinating. Once she has opened up that distance, she roams the breadth of it. The spoken monologue of “Kingsize” unfolds somewhere between the terrestrial world and a dream, and, as in dreams, sexual symbols fuse with the bizarre. “I sing to the bananas,” Hval continues. “The skin is getting thin and brown.”
Hval is a thirty-four-year-old Norwegian musician and writer, and “Apocalypse, girl” is her third album under her own name; she has also released two albums as Rockettothesky, and recorded in various partnerships. Gender is a central theme in her music: “Innocence Is Kinky” grew out of her work on a sound installation, a response to images of women’s faces that were taken from sources including Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Carl Dreyer’s silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” “The camera is a mirror / But mine, not yours,” Hval sings, on “Renée Falconetti of Orléans.” “Innocence Is Kinky” feels brittle, moving from outbursts of electric guitar to spoken word to eerie, pretty melodies that recall the occult chill of PJ Harvey’s album “White Chalk” (2007). (Hval’s record was produced by John Parish, Harvey’s longtime collaborator.) Like Harvey, Hval pursues two of the big themes, power and desire, but where Harvey, especially on her early albums, seemed to parody or role-play masculine bravado, Hval’s music is far less aggressive than her lyrics might suggest. As an answer to the question “What is soft dick rock?,” “Apocalypse, girl” presents a kind of experimental folk music, which resists the rhythmic and melodic efficiencies—or, one might say, the conquests—of chart pop in favor of something slower and more irregular, with few hooks or choruses.
Hval has toured recently with Mike Hadreas (who performs as Perfume Genius), another artist who isn’t shy about challenging gender conventions. In his songs, Hadreas details the dangers that may confront gay men who express their sexuality openly; sometimes he turns the tables, adopting with pride the flamboyant queerness that bigots find threatening. Hval, too, is interested in danger. What both artists describe is the trouble and the pleasure experienced by people who might be classified as unmanly: gay men, women, and, in Hval’s case, the rare straight man who “dares stay soft.” “Can we go there?” she sings, on “Take Care of Yourself.” “We don’t have to fuck. Can we just lie here being?”
Hval is an artist of many questions—the ones she asks, and those she provokes in the listener. “Apocalypse, girl” swerves from decipherable politics to recondite personal imagery. It’s not a paraphrasable album, but it is a listenable one, its avant-garde tendencies held in check by Hval’s beguiling voice, and by instrumentation that accrues in layers. Nine musicians are listed in the album credits, playing keyboards, harp, and mellotron, among other things, but the instruments tend to blur together, as do the songs, which flow into one another without pause. Hval’s voice is high, and, though her melodies don’t seem fixed, she sounds assured, as if she trusts where she’s headed. “I want to sing religiously,” she sings, on a track called “Heaven.” She ventures into the realm of unembarrassed feeling, letting her voice curl upward to the limit of her register, glorying in the sound and the momentum of her words as much as in their meaning. “Heaven” builds to a crescendo, with percussion crashes and harp trills; if this is the music of apocalypse, it’s quite lovely.
“Apocalypse, girl” wanders through the fallout of the twenty-first century without ever quite arriving at a showdown. “Statistics and newspapers tell me I am unhappy and dying,” Hval sings, on “That Battle Is Over,” against the warm chords of a mellotron. Her tone is wry, though it soon turns piqued. “And it’s biology, it’s my own fault,” she continues, an exasperated reply to the media’s frequent exhortation of women: Improve, improve, improve! If you don’t, you’ve got only yourself to blame. The album cover is a harshly lit photograph of a woman slumped over an exercise ball; it looks as if she’s been murdered, but perhaps she’s just given up.
For this album, Hval drew on the film “Safe,” from 1995, which was directed by Todd Haynes. The parallels are both visual (that cover shot, which, like the film, evokes a quietly threatening space between external violence and personal surrender) and thematic. In one scene, the lead character, Carol White, a wealthy Los Angeles housewife (played by Julianne Moore), who has mysteriously become ill, fails to complete an aerobics class. The film is set in 1987, and the participants are dressed in high-cut leotards and pastel leggings. They kick and clap, but Carol falls behind. Is her failure her own fault, or is something killing her?
“Safe” shows a kind of apocalypse without a climax. There are no weapons or explosions, just a woman suffering from vague but pervasive allergies, gradually disintegrating. The film is a portrait of Reagan-era narcissism, and Hval’s album suggests that we haven’t travelled very far since then. “You say I’m free now / That battle is over / And feminism’s over,” Hval sings, on “That Battle Is Over.” It is the most straightforward pop song on the album, girded by a loping drumbeat, but the lyrics form a scathing critique of political indifference, and Hval’s vocal could be heard as a spoof on the vacuous good feeling that so many pop songs aim to create. At full tilt, her melody line suggests enjoyment, but her words don’t. “Yeah, I say, I can consume what I want now,” she sings, and it sounds like a hollow victory. ♦
