Tony Stamp tackles Norwegian musician Jenny Hval’s latest collection of poetic musings; and the new album by London’s Ibibio Sound Machine, which continues their marriage of Nigerian lyrics with electronic grooves - this time with help from Hot Chip.
Classic Objects by Jenny Hval
Jenny Hval Photo: supplied
The press material for the new album by Norwegian musician Jenny Hval claims that it’s her “version of a pop album”. That’s a bit disingenuous - the music Hval makes can be challenging and experimental, but she’s always included some lovely melodies, sung in her lovely voice. Regardless, it’s fair to say Classic Objects is the closest she’s come to the mainstream.
It’s just that in Hval’s case the route involves synth drones, outdoor field recordings, and, as always, lots of meandering, poetic philosophising about life.
Around twenty years ago she spent time in Melbourne, studying creative writing and performance, and singing in a few bands while she was there. She’d already fronted a goth metal outfit back home.
Hval’s Masters’ thesis was called "The Singing Voice as Literature," and that idea has informed her output since. Her songs unfold like tangent-heavy stories, and her habit of slipping into spoken word has drawn comparisons to Laurie Anderson.
She’s also a published author - her most recent novel is called To Hate God - and is fond of hanging concepts on her albums - Blood Bitch, for example, is broadly about menstruation, and more specifically, a time-travelling vampire called Orlando.
For Classic Objects, Hval was dealing with the solitude of lockdown and challenged herself to write songs that were just about her.
She has always included personal politics in her music. She’s not afraid to provoke to make a point, and while this album is less scathing than her earlier ones, it's still barbed.
‘Year of Love’ subverts her own marriage, with choice lines like “‘It's just for contractual reasons”, as well as a reference to the “industrial happiness complex”; and right when we hit the swooning chord change that starts the chorus, she deflates it with “in the year of love I signed a deal with the patriarchy”.
‘Cemetery of Splendour’ is named after a film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose work is focused on the receding natural world.
The song starts with Hval reminiscing about performing in empty bars (in Melbourne, perhaps), then halfway through outdoor sounds fade up as she describes a forest scene, before getting distracted by things like gum and cigarette butts.
It’s a moment that tips over into self-parody, barrels though, and transcends out the other side.
The palette of this album feels very deliberate. It’s less abrasive than Hval’s previous work, and the percussion and guitars that run through it feel so very tasteful, I wondered if what used to be called world music was being lightly satirised here.
She still indulges in long song durations for the most part. The exception is ‘Freedom’, which in just two minutes, articulates her thoughts on democracy, art, and the natural world.
I don’t think Jenny Hval could make a straight-up pop record if she tried, and that’s a good thing. It means we get tunes like ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Owned’, which nods to Gil Scott Heron in its title, and halfway through points out that the song you’re listening to is “regulated by copyright regulations”, but dreams aren’t.
Like a lot of this album, it’s silly on first blush, then increasingly thought-provoking. And if you want to ignore all that and just hum along, that’s fine too.
Electricity by Ibibio Sound Machine
Ibibio Sound Machine Photo: supplied
Sometimes a band’s name gives you an idea what to expect.
Ibibio Sound Machine are a London outfit that took the ‘sound machine’ moniker from Miami Sound Machine, led by Gloria Estefan. Ibibio is the language front-woman Eno Williams sings in alongside English. It’s also the name of the region in Nigeria she grew up in.
They’ve always been a conglomerate of disparate influences - started by some English studio boffins, joined by Williams and Ghanian guitarist Alfred Bannerman, with percussionists and horn players from various regions coming and going along the way.
Their first three albums were produced by founder Max Grunhard, but for the fourth, Electricity, they enlisted the dance five-piece Hot Chip, and the result is an intriguing fusion of both band’s styles.
The title track ‘Electricity’, contains an intriguing flex from the multilingual Eno Williams - she sings “all these words mean so much to some people/ to me it’s all the same”. Perhaps to illustrate her point, she rhymes ‘emergency’ and ‘financially’ with ‘fiddle dee dee’, and goes on to say “without love, there’s no electricity”.
It could also be a reference to the sound of the album. Ibibio Sound Machine have been a synth-heavy outfit from the start, but this album is their most, well, electric. There’s an abundance of fizzing, squelching synthesisers, which, alongside Williams’ fondness for broad hooks, and the band’s habit of borrowing from multiple genres of previous eras, give the album a slightly dated feel on first listen. But there’s plenty of modernity in the production, and attitude.
Williams delivers the chorus on “Protection From Evil’ like it’s a sermon, and you can imagine the fire and brimstone the band must deliver in a live scenario. There’s a bit of post-punk to it, and much of its power comes from staying on one root note for the entire track.
Hot Chip’s Al Doyle and Joe Goddard supply some of the song's anarchic synth lines, but my favourite part is when guitar player Bannerman adds a very African-sounding stringed instrument to proceedings. I believe it’s what’s listed in the credits as a korego.
Apparently, the collaboration between ISM and Hot Chip sprung from mutual admiration across festival stages, and it’s interesting to note that while some of these songs sound very Hot Chip, Goddard and Doyle aren’t credited with any of the writing.
Maybe it’s just the propulsive kick drum and fruity keys that draw the comparison on songs like ‘Wanna See Your Face Again’, where Williams easily slips into the role of house diva.
The album’s high point might be ‘All That You Want’, where the tempo slows, giving room for Bannerman’s chicken-scratch guitar to shine through, and for the band’s horn section to take centre stage.
The band have described Electricity as the darkest thing they’ve ever done, born of a turbulent time in the world, but to me, there’s plenty of joy in these songs. An electronic sheen encases the whole thing, but within that, there are multiple breadcrumbs leading to different genres from different decades, all referenced with aplomb and passion.
