"Look at these trees / Look at this grass / Look at those clouds," intoned the Observatory's Vivian Wang at the outset of Jenny Hval's 2019 record The Practice of Love. She continued, surveying a moist, minuscule universe of mushrooms and small blue flowers: "Study this and ask yourself / Where is God?"
"Cemetery of Splendour" — the clicking, chirruping centrepiece of Hval's latest record, Classic Objects — finds the Norwegian avant-pop sorcerer in a similar state of wonderment. "Trees, stick, rocks / Bamboo leaf / Bamboo leaf again / Then the branch / The branch / The pinecone!" she says giddily, a smile stretching her words like taffy. "And the birds, in the distance / Gum, gum, gum! / Cigarette butts / Candy wrapper / A button."
Gone is Wang's cool stoicism, Hval's gentle cadence recalling the joyous freedom of Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins. Gone, too, is the solitude of Wang's observation; her sombre curiosity at the holy absence of human intrusion. Surrounded by bodily imprints and interloping garbage, Hval revels in the currents of human movement at a place reserved for the departed. "Shoes came here / And here / And here / Someone once laid down here" — though she stands in a courtyard of death, all she sees is life.
Hval's work has never shied from humanity and the pulse of living. Her albums peer, often and unafraid, into the wet depths of the body and brain. But the intimate humanity of Classic Objects feels like something else. Warm, loose and occupied by the realities of creative work and the contradictory comfort of our "normcore institutions," it manages to be Hval's most accessible record yet. It fearlessly holds her seemingly divergent identities — artist and worker, partner and provocateur, realist and dreamer — beneath the same glittering disco ball.
The jubilant graveyard walk of "Cemetery of Splendour" encapsulates the tone — both musically and thematically — of Classic Objects as a whole. Hval has never stayed in one lane for long, and Classic Objects finds her eschewing the trance-indebted throb of The Practice of Love for percussive, guitar-and-keys led pop music. There are traces of Graceland's rhythmic jamboree and Talk Talk's patient quietude, but Hval's unmistakable voice and inimitable melodies make comparisons feel more or less obsolete. The album shimmers and floats with a wide-eyed delight, as though Hval and her players are performing several feet above the ground. The blue sky of the album's artwork is an obvious touchstone for its sonic world.
The patchwork diorama positioned below that sky is integral too — beneath a monument of clarity and freedom sits a piece of physical structure, all seams and glue and human intention. Classic Objects is about many things, but it is mostly about the mechanics of creation. Specifically, the labour that churns behind that creation, and the place where work and art and self become inextricable from one another — "There was a painter / In my first studio space / That I remember / She used to attach / Her own hair / To her paintings," Hval sings over the rolling hand drums of the title track.
Amid the cascading harp of "Freedom," Hval pines for "somewhere where art is free / Not that it ever was." The song is a prayer of sorts, for a place where expression is genuinely as liberating as it sometimes feels, and where autonomy, creative or otherwise, is never a question — "When I listen deep / I'm not my owner / Maybe I never was." In the Zia Anger-directed video for "Jupiter," an overworked, underpaid video crew piles into a hot air balloon, floating in precarity while Hval sings, "Sometimes art is more real / More evil / Just lonelier / Just so lonely." The myth of the tortured artist has long been outmoded, but what of the artist as inexhaustible freewheeler? Work is work regardless of the goal, Hval reminds us again and again on Classic Objects, as she attempts to dismantle the fantastical, biblical whiff that lingers on creation.
Hval's dedication to the unseen — exposing the sweat and scaffolding, the trash nestled in the grass — extends to her own self-creation, as she surveys the cognizant makeup of her life. Over the incessant chime and staccato guitar of opening track "Year of Love," she recounts the story of her self-consciously low-stakes marriage — "'It's just for contractual reasons,' I explained / Signing the papers" — before recalling the time a man proposed to a woman in front of her at her own concert. The act instantly deflates the haven of unfamiliarity, the "multitudes of colours," that she was attempting to conjure from stage, and she is incredulous that she's suddenly become a heterosexual proposal soundtrack against her will. But she'd done the same after all, simply stripped of the spectacle and saccharine romance — "I am giving it my voice / But then again / I already did / Oh, already did," she sings as the song surges around her.
The album's crown jewel — dug up, cut and painstakingly buffed — is the irrepressible groove of "American Coffee," where Hval wonders at the places where fate and autonomy commingle to create a life. Who is the other Jenny, the one who chose a different sort of labour, a different set of flavours? "I wonder who I'd be if I'd never got to go / Get a fine arts degree / And American coffee," she sings, holding this other self — the one unafraid to drive, the one so versed in normality — against a backdrop of choral coos, silver-toned organ and burbling percussion.
Classic Objects ought to be weighed down by its thematic density, by its specificity and insistence on revealing its own ropes and pulleys. It's to Hval's immense credit that it feels airborne instead, the work of an artist operating at the height of her craft. "I crossed paths with a version of me," she sings toward the end of "American Coffee," her voice ringing like crystal chimes. "She had quit everything / Music and identity / Just left a little blood behind." Thank god Hval is here instead — blood, sweat and all — to explain just how she got here.
"Cemetery of Splendour" — the clicking, chirruping centrepiece of Hval's latest record, Classic Objects — finds the Norwegian avant-pop sorcerer in a similar state of wonderment. "Trees, stick, rocks / Bamboo leaf / Bamboo leaf again / Then the branch / The branch / The pinecone!" she says giddily, a smile stretching her words like taffy. "And the birds, in the distance / Gum, gum, gum! / Cigarette butts / Candy wrapper / A button."
Gone is Wang's cool stoicism, Hval's gentle cadence recalling the joyous freedom of Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins. Gone, too, is the solitude of Wang's observation; her sombre curiosity at the holy absence of human intrusion. Surrounded by bodily imprints and interloping garbage, Hval revels in the currents of human movement at a place reserved for the departed. "Shoes came here / And here / And here / Someone once laid down here" — though she stands in a courtyard of death, all she sees is life.
Hval's work has never shied from humanity and the pulse of living. Her albums peer, often and unafraid, into the wet depths of the body and brain. But the intimate humanity of Classic Objects feels like something else. Warm, loose and occupied by the realities of creative work and the contradictory comfort of our "normcore institutions," it manages to be Hval's most accessible record yet. It fearlessly holds her seemingly divergent identities — artist and worker, partner and provocateur, realist and dreamer — beneath the same glittering disco ball.
The jubilant graveyard walk of "Cemetery of Splendour" encapsulates the tone — both musically and thematically — of Classic Objects as a whole. Hval has never stayed in one lane for long, and Classic Objects finds her eschewing the trance-indebted throb of The Practice of Love for percussive, guitar-and-keys led pop music. There are traces of Graceland's rhythmic jamboree and Talk Talk's patient quietude, but Hval's unmistakable voice and inimitable melodies make comparisons feel more or less obsolete. The album shimmers and floats with a wide-eyed delight, as though Hval and her players are performing several feet above the ground. The blue sky of the album's artwork is an obvious touchstone for its sonic world.
The patchwork diorama positioned below that sky is integral too — beneath a monument of clarity and freedom sits a piece of physical structure, all seams and glue and human intention. Classic Objects is about many things, but it is mostly about the mechanics of creation. Specifically, the labour that churns behind that creation, and the place where work and art and self become inextricable from one another — "There was a painter / In my first studio space / That I remember / She used to attach / Her own hair / To her paintings," Hval sings over the rolling hand drums of the title track.
Amid the cascading harp of "Freedom," Hval pines for "somewhere where art is free / Not that it ever was." The song is a prayer of sorts, for a place where expression is genuinely as liberating as it sometimes feels, and where autonomy, creative or otherwise, is never a question — "When I listen deep / I'm not my owner / Maybe I never was." In the Zia Anger-directed video for "Jupiter," an overworked, underpaid video crew piles into a hot air balloon, floating in precarity while Hval sings, "Sometimes art is more real / More evil / Just lonelier / Just so lonely." The myth of the tortured artist has long been outmoded, but what of the artist as inexhaustible freewheeler? Work is work regardless of the goal, Hval reminds us again and again on Classic Objects, as she attempts to dismantle the fantastical, biblical whiff that lingers on creation.
Hval's dedication to the unseen — exposing the sweat and scaffolding, the trash nestled in the grass — extends to her own self-creation, as she surveys the cognizant makeup of her life. Over the incessant chime and staccato guitar of opening track "Year of Love," she recounts the story of her self-consciously low-stakes marriage — "'It's just for contractual reasons,' I explained / Signing the papers" — before recalling the time a man proposed to a woman in front of her at her own concert. The act instantly deflates the haven of unfamiliarity, the "multitudes of colours," that she was attempting to conjure from stage, and she is incredulous that she's suddenly become a heterosexual proposal soundtrack against her will. But she'd done the same after all, simply stripped of the spectacle and saccharine romance — "I am giving it my voice / But then again / I already did / Oh, already did," she sings as the song surges around her.
The album's crown jewel — dug up, cut and painstakingly buffed — is the irrepressible groove of "American Coffee," where Hval wonders at the places where fate and autonomy commingle to create a life. Who is the other Jenny, the one who chose a different sort of labour, a different set of flavours? "I wonder who I'd be if I'd never got to go / Get a fine arts degree / And American coffee," she sings, holding this other self — the one unafraid to drive, the one so versed in normality — against a backdrop of choral coos, silver-toned organ and burbling percussion.
Classic Objects ought to be weighed down by its thematic density, by its specificity and insistence on revealing its own ropes and pulleys. It's to Hval's immense credit that it feels airborne instead, the work of an artist operating at the height of her craft. "I crossed paths with a version of me," she sings toward the end of "American Coffee," her voice ringing like crystal chimes. "She had quit everything / Music and identity / Just left a little blood behind." Thank god Hval is here instead — blood, sweat and all — to explain just how she got here.