Jenny Hval: "That Battle Is Over"
With the music of Norwegian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jenny Hval, there’s a tendency to talk about accessories first—the way she floods her songs with strange samples and shards of noise, the nerves she touches with lyrics about getting off and going numb, the arrangements she uses to subvert most everything you thought you knew about song structure. From her hard-question lyrics to her high-minded sonics, all those elements certainly contributed to the success of 2013′s Innocence is Kinky.
But there’s a simpler, more visceral charm to Hval’s music, too: her voice, an understated, soulful purr that somehow twists between innocence and experience, adolescent naiveté and forbidden-fruit knowledge. “That Battle is Over”, from the forthcoming Apocalypse, girl, is an apt showing of the instrument’s many sides. “What is it to take care of yourself?” she whispers at the start over drums that swing slowly. Across the next four minutes, as organs and synths suggest an infinite gloaming, she moves between low murmurs and stunning crests, quick polysyllabic runs and slow stretched notes. In the span of five seconds, she summons both Aaliyah and Laurie Anderson by harmonizing with herself, countering peaks with plummets.
That versatility only reinforces the song’s purpose, a perspicacious look at how we want to live versus how science and society tell us we should be living. It’s a battle we all face, even if we can’t deliver it like Hval, one of music’s most eloquent articulators of modern malaise: “Statistics and newspapers tell me that I am unhappy and dying,” she sings, her voice at once nervous and defiant. It’s as though she is still deciding whether that is admission or admonishment.
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