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Minggu, 30 Oktober 2016
Minggu, 23 Oktober 2016
Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker
Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker
Leonard Cohen has been bidding his farewell for decades, since before we ever met him. In 1966, he opened Beautiful Losers—his mystical, lysergic, gleefully obscene second novel—with the sunset plea, "Can I love you in my own way? I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face." He was just 32 then, rakish without ravaging, not yet celebrated for pairing wry, elegant sacrilege to folk melodies—a year before courting "Suzanne," 18 from raising his "Hallelujah." But even then, he was conscious and deferential to the light waning around him.
Which is a placidity his followers don't always share; what other 82-year-old artist could possibly acknowledge his impending mortality and alarm his fans enough to recant? After The New Yorker's remarkable recent profile quoted him as "ready to die"—depicting a mentally dexterous, physically frail ascetic "confined to barracks" in Los Angeles, solemnly tidying his affairs—Cohen took pains to console his fans, with familiar drollness: "I've always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever." But even as he demurs, it's hard not to play his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, and hear a pristine, piously crafted last testament—a courtly act of finality that extends to the title. (Notice it's not a question; it's a prescription.)
Cohen has always kicked up his heels in the ambiguities of love and spirituality—casting prayers to the carnal, getting off on enlightenment. And so this new darkness he offers has dimensions instead of declaratives—it feels, in turn, to lyrically reference the encroaching blackness of death, the insularity of plumbing the soul ever-deeper, a fresh fatalism toward the spinning world. "I'm leaving the table/I'm out of the game/I don't know the people/In your picture frame," he laments, achingly, on "Leaving the Table," over a warm and minimal waltz. Later, he intones, "I'm traveling light/It's au revoir/My once so bright/My fallen star" ("Traveling Light"). It's delivered with a wink, and no more dramatically brooding than his past work, but it is inescapably morbid; every track is vivid yet still enigmatic as it conjures loss and lamentation of some variety.
This darkness also apparent in the newly fathomless boom of his baritone, which already stripped the floorboards on recent albums Old Ideas and Popular Problems. Whereas the rough edges of his younger, nasal reediness suggested chic bohemian nonchalance, now his low caroling is edged in defiance, and Darker's production is singularly complementary to it. When he imagines, not so subtly, the stars above him losing light ("If I Didn't Have Your Love"), his intoning dips below cherubic organs, hinting at what these enamored lyrics soon reveal—that this bright devotional is of the spiritual sort, hewing closer to his past career as a monk than as a Olympic-level ladies' man. (The most jarring thing about Darker is how utterly devoid of lust it is.) The gracious, spare production adds to the spell—contributed by his son, Adam Cohen, who almost wholly replaces his father's proclivities for tinny keyboards and stately, gospel-esque female harmonies in favor of violins, warm acoustic guitar, and a cantor male choir. The elder Cohen's familiar scaffolding of flamenco-influenced guitar remains, a bridge to history.
Cohen is not a songwriter who panders; he speaks above us, sometimes quite literally to higher forms, but also to universality instead of common denominator. Topicality, to him, remains somewhere around the Romantic era. But Cohen is also keen to experiment here. He embraces spry, rootsy bluegrass strings on "Steer Your Way," which nods back in a few directions—to his college stint in a country band, to 1971's Songs of Love and Hate (which featured Charlie Daniels on fiddle), to brighter moments on Popular Problems. The album's final track, for the first time, is a string reprise; it bows out "String Reprise/Treaty," Cohen's difficult conversation with his higher power ("I wish there was a treaty we could sign/It's over now, the water and the wine/We were broken then, but now we're borderline") with delicate, mournful dignity.
The album's heart is exposed early, and plainly, in the title track. Its religious tones veer toward disdainful ("If you are the dealer/I'm out of the game/If you are the healer/I'm broken and lame") but his oaky growl quickly becomes rapturous. Three times, as the choir drops out, he chants, "Hineni Hineni"—a Hebrew cry of devotion, the reply of a ready worshipper who hears their calling from God and is ready to act in service. Often, it's the service in the afterlife. His is not a yelp of fervor, or excitable in any shade; the moment is his most quaking, sunken baritone delivery on the album—so deep, it would sound sinister without such compassion imbuing it. It's the informed conclusion of a lifetime of inquiry. Hopefully, it is one holy dialogue of more still to come. But in this moment, he sounds satisfied; he has loved us in his own way, and he is ready for what awaits him next. But that doesn't mean we are.
October 24, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Selasa, 18 Oktober 2016
Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Weyes Blood: Front Row Seat to Earth
Weyes Blood: Front Row Seat to Earth
Weyes Blood makes serious music, but she doesn't take herself too seriously. Proof of that can be found in the final seconds of Front Row Seat to Earth, the fourth full-length from the singer/songwriter/producer born Natalie Mering. A brass band breaks through the din of hazy film samples and warped classical piano with the kind of royal proclamation that declares, "I'm here!"—just as the soiree is ending. Oops! Or look to the album's cover. The scene—a river winding through a dystopian landscape, with Mering perched on her side in the middle of it all, clad in a stylish turquoise satin suit—is mesmerizing. Then the eye moves towards her shoes: beat-up sneakers. What the hell?
Front Row works sort of similarly. The songs overflow with tender harmonies worthy of a Roches record and ornate instrumentation (from Mering and a strong cast of contributors) that blends '70s AM radio, the psychier end of late '60s folk, and touches of Celtic and Renaissance music. But listen closer and there's often a slightly alien (and typically electronic) undercurrent that keeps you intrigued. It's there in the ominous synth line that rises up from below a peaceful acoustic and tasteful woodblock and shakers in "Away Above," and again in the deadpan background vocals that haunt "Seven Words" just below the surface of a doe-eyed slide guitar solo from Hand Habits' Meg Duffy.
The over-the-top pinnacle of this effect comes on the knockout six-and-a-half-minute single "Do You Need My Love," where Mering sustains a note—on the word "need"—intermittently in the song's last half. All around her calm belt, calamity stirs: a brass band, piano chords, a thick bassline, graceful and complex percussion, and above all, an ominous synth that glows like an orb, brighter and brighter to the end. Keep in mind, this is a song that two minutes earlier, featured a breakdown comprised of psychedelic organ and thunder noises, which sounds like an oddly specific combination to anyone who hasn't endured the Doors. At times Mering really does sound like "Enya Does the Lost Songs of Karen Carpenter (Backed by Ray Manzarek)." But thankfully her lyrics don't also lose themselves in mystical platitudes borrowed from generations past. She cuts through the bullshit here: "Do you need my love?" she asks, walking the line between robotic and serene. "Do you need someone?"
As much of a throwback as Mering can seem, at her best she captures her generation in her words. On "Generation Why," arguably the album's centerpiece, she actually sings the letters "YOLO" with more thoughtful care than the phrase ever deserved. Using the kind of dulcet finger-picking and flowery folk-singer phrasing that's been easy to dismiss as wimpy for decades, Mering essentially chronicles how she learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. "I've been hanging/On my phone all day/And the fear goes away," she says, trying to embrace the kids' distraction of choice from the coming end times. Later, she surmises, almost kicking herself halfway through for jinxing it, "It's not the past/That scares me/Now what a great future/This is gonna be."
Even Mering's less philosophical takes feel distinctly modern. "Be Free," the song that sounds the most like a waltz, finds her embracing an independent approach to drifting apart that seems more now than of the free love era its far-out sounds might have worked within. "It's just the two of us/And I want you to be free/Don't worry about me/I got my thing," she sings. As first she sounds perfectly clear (the record's production is excellent), but by the end, in creep those alien background vocals again.
It's this ability—to twist an homage just enough to show that you're aware of how totally saccharine it sounds—that makes Mering shine in a way she hasn't on her albums up to this point. She commits more fully to the world she's building here, though 2014's sprawling rock rumination The Innocents is not without its highlights. Her approach (not her sound) recalls Angelo Badalamenti's lush, over-the-top score to "Twin Peaks." It was overwhelming and kitschy, but you could tell that he knew it, particularly when paired with David Lynch's work. Mering's music might sound like it belongs from a bygone era, but she definitely knows it. If you listen closely enough, you can start to locate her in this fantastical backdrop—sly, knowing and assured. What, doesn't everyone wear sneakers to the apocalypse?
October 19, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- NxWorries: Yes Lawd!
NxWorries: Yes Lawd!
Imagine it: You grew up in Oxnard, Calif. Your dad went to prison for beating your mom. You had a kid with your second wife. You lost your job, and a place to live. You were homeless.
Your friends looked out for you. You slowly picked yourself up. You changed your name: Breezy Lovejoy became Anderson .Paak. You gained some traction, partly by redoubling your focus on your vocals, leaving the beatmaking to producers you trusted. Some Soundcloud hits followed, some friendships with well-connected rappers, a sophomore album, Venice, on which your voice had gone from a blunt instrument to a swiss army knife, able to do 15 different things at once.
And then you got the call. From Aftermath, Dr. Dre's label. A representative was checking to see if you were interested in the American dream, California rap edition—in working with an icon you'd been listening to since you were six years old. You made it.
Channel that experience, .Paak's own recent past, into a single song, and you might come up with something like "Livvin," the first proper song off Yes Lawd!, his new joint album with the beatmaker Knxledge. "Livvin" is triumph incarnate, a new entry in the tradition of "ashy-to-classy" tracks like "Juicy" and "Touch the Sky." .Paak preaches the gospel of success in between rolling drums, mellow horns, and a church choir. His voice's inextricability from the music is a testament to his chemistry with a producer steeped in the tradition of the beat scene godheads, Dilla and Madlib. (.Paak and Knx, whose real name is Glen Boothe, have merged their names into NxWorries, an apparent nod to the definitive Stones Throw duos, Jaylib and Madvillain.)
.Paak's sudden stardom, largely due to his work with Dre and to this year's Malibu, his extraordinary third album, might tempt listeners to give him the credit for Yes Lawd!'s many successes. But the record, which includes tracks recorded between early 2015 and March 2016, is first and foremost a beat tape, stacked with beautiful little donuts, most of which don't pass the three-minute mark. Knx was raised on church music, hip-hop radio, and J Dilla, and the rich instrumentals here are loaded with tributes to all three. "Sidepiece" offers .Paak a chance to sing the lyrics of "Won't Do" from Dilla's posthumous album The Shining: "One won't do and two is not enough for me, no," while "Can't Stop" is a zoned-out moment of musical reverie that intimately recalls Jay Dee. The beats are the soul of the album, and .Paak serves as a faithful instrument, the organ at their core.
Producers have fallen hard for .Paak and here, he shows several reasons why his stock has risen so quickly. He's uniquely aware of the flexibility of his voice as an instrument and is one of the more emotive rappers I can remember hearing, on a level with DMX or Young Thug. On "Best One," even as he expresses gratitude for a woman who's taken him in, you can hear urgency, and empathy, in his voice: "You know I could be leaving in a moment's notice/You telling me to stay to the morning/You know a nigga homeless." On "Lyk Dis," he channels no one so much as Erykah Badu, riding the beat with gravelly, percussive verses delivered in short bursts.
In the past, Knxledge has had trouble focusing on a particular sound for too long, but it's his focus that holds the record together through 19 tracks, even as he shows off his range. On "What More Can I Say," one of the prettiest songs here, mournful violin strings engage in a duet with a quiet bass rumble, and their interchange makes for some of the most moving music on the album, particularly when the horns arrive. (If you pride yourself on recognizing samples, this album will offer up a form of exquisite torture at least a couple of times, as you attempt to track down lovely little fragments.) The shuffling beat on "Link Up" is one of the more subtle offerings here, but its winding rhythms and muted sample make .Paak sound as if he's singing from the middle of the dancefloor, appropriate for a song about nocturnal pursuits.
Many of .Paak's songs are about going out, and particularly about women, and it's in their lyrics that Yes Lawd! reveals one of its only issues, a lack of lyrical substance. While an artist like Drake comfortably straddles the line between rapper and R&B singer, .Paak is more of a crooner than a rhymer. There are too few moments like the clever little lyrical elaboration on "Best One": "I could leave it at a drop of a fedora/But damn it girl I want you."
And what we get instead can be ugly. On "Livvin," .Paak sings about the feeling of ascending the ladder, but on some songs, it seems like he's pulling it up behind him. The sentiment toward other strivers on "H.A.N." is stingy, and .Paak's portraits of his relationships are often shallow—a fact that the final track "Fkku" seems to acknowledge, giving a woman's voice the record's final kiss-off. The worrisome thing here is not that .Paak can be sexist. It's that there's nothing to counter or contextualize his attitude. On "Suede," .Paak makes an explicit effort to justify the slurs he frequently uses: "If I call you a bitch/It's cause you're my bitch/And as long as no one else call you a bitch/Then there won't be no problems."
The records that .Paak and Boothe admire, the classic Stones Throw collaborations, found two artists working at the absolute height of their talents. Madvillainy, in particular, was a perfect match between an internal rhyme genius in Doom and a beatmaking savant in Madlib. That album, released in 2004, remains a high water mark in Stones Throw's history. .Paak and Knx are both so talented that it seems fair to hold them to that standard. And what's astonishing here is the way they manage to forge a sound nearly as rich and original as that of America's most blunted. One of the few disappointing things about the largely terrific Yes Lawd! is the way that Knx outdoes .Paak, but the rapper/singer is at the beginning of a bright career in which he's already demonstrated his ability to write rich lyrics—this record, which includes some of the most beautiful songs he's made yet, has far more to be proud of than not. It's another major accomplishment in .Paak's continued rise.
October 18, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Minggu, 16 Oktober 2016
Recommended for you: Add post to Buffer with DO Note
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Selasa, 04 Oktober 2016
Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Solange: A Seat at the Table
Solange: A Seat at the Table
Solange Knowles turned 30 in June, and it seems clear that her Saturn Returns manifested in an artistic surge. A Seat at the Table, her third full-length album, is the work of a woman who's truly grown into herself, and discovered within a clear, exhilarating statement of self and community that's as robust in its quieter moments as it is in its funkier ones. Even though it's been out less than a week, it already seems like a document of historical significance, not just for its formidable musical achievements but for the way it encapsulates black cultural and social history with such richness, generosity, and truth.
To this point, Solange has been trying on styles and stretching out into her own skills as a songwriter. Having spent her early teen years singing backup and writing songs, she debuted as a solo artist at just 16, with Solo Star. Very 2003, it was a gleaming, hip-hop-informed album that slinked over beats from the likes of Timbaland and the Neptunes; even with plenty of great tracks, the production outweighed her presence. After a five-year break as a solo artist—during which she got married, had son Juelz, moved to Idaho, got divorced, starred in Bring It On: All or Nothing, among other films, and wrote songs for her sister Beyoncé (whew!)—she returned in 2008 with Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams. That album was clearly immersed in a deep love of '60s funk and soul and its attendant politics, and she rebelled against expectations (see: "Fuck the Industry"), eager to fully express her individuality. She fused her musical impulses in the easy, ebullient grooves of 2012's True EP, which eased a glossier vision of pop into the soulfunk groove she had ingrained.
Even with such an impressive resume, though, A Seat at the Table is on a different plane. It's a document of the struggle of a black woman, and black women, in 2016, as Solange confronts painful indignities and situates them historically. Many of these songs draw from current reactions to the seemingly unending killing of black women and men at the hands of the police, but the scope of the record as a whole is much larger than that, with Civil Rights hymnals encompassing centuries of horror black Americans have been subject to, including that inflicted on Knowles' own ancestors. But even when Solange offers her narrative in first-person and incorporates her family's past through interludes with her mother Tina and father Mathew, she does so with such artistic and emotional openness that this album feels like nothing but a salve.
The quick sketch "Rise" opens slowly, on a sweet piano and with layers of Solange's voice in jazz modulations, as a sort of blessing and a placid encouragement to thrive despite it all. "Fall in your ways, so you can crumble," she sings. "Fall in your ways, so you can wake up and rise." The word "rise" lands on the high note, but the song lays out the album's central tension between pain, pride, sorrow, and fierce dignity. This leads directly into "Weary," a ginger, breathy document of exhaustion, and the deceptively euphoric "Cranes in the Sky," which, taken as a "Weary"'s counterpart, illustrates two stages of sorrow. What's so touching about "Cranes," though—intertwined with the airy, peaceful beauty of its video—is the way Solange specifically documents her process of coping, down to the smallest escape mechanisms. On a warm bass strut, she sings about drinking, sexing, running, and spending in an effort to be free from "those metal clouds," making visible the kinds of mundane things we all do in the service of a temporary reprieve. Naming these actions feels radical in and of itself, but by the time she flies off her own cloud of a a Minnie Riperton-level aria, she seems to have freed herself from the routine, and transcended it.
Solange has said that it was important to her to articulate her roots, and so along with the recordings of her parents, she made the bulk of A Seat at the Table in New Iberia, Louisiana, "based on that area being the start of everything within our family's lineage," the place where Tina Knowles-Lawson's parents first met and then fled after being "run out of town." In terms of production, her song structures, and melodies, she celebrates the whole history of black music. But the result is never derivative; when you recognize the spirits of artists like Riperton, Zapp, Angie Stone, Aaliyah (lyrically, in "Borderline (An Ode to Self Care"), Janet Jackson, Stanley Clarke, Lil Mo, Herbie freakin' Hancock and so many more, it feels more like a musical nod or a wink.
The master musician and bandleader Raphael Saadiq serves as co-producer; Saadiq meets Solange in the juiciest middle, both bridging their instincts between classic instrumentation and futuristic funk. The arrangements are voluminous, loose and tight at once, but Solange's voice is always at the front of this proscenium; each shows restraint as they lean into her collective vision. The sound they conjure is chill-inducing, an easy sound for subject matter that's as real and tough as it gets. The excellent "Don't Touch My Hair" (with a feature by Sampha) and "Mad" (her second collaboration with Lil Wayne) specifically address the way black women are devalued, and the songs meet that with resistance. Solange's voice is a palliative for the pain she describes, as she names truths to divest them of their power.
A Seat at the Table offers a hearth to black women as much as it asserts Solange's right to comfort and understanding. And in terms of her lived experience, the table of the album's title, metaphysical and physical, rests in her home of New Orleans. In several interludes, the rapper, label head, and entrepreneur Master P threads the album with musings on No Limit's runaway success as a black-owned record label (landed him on the Forbes list, baby). That particular segment leads into "F.U.B.U." ("For Us, By Us"), a honey-dripped slow-grinder of black affirmation, with tubas that sound inspired by NOLA's Second Lines as Solange mews, "This shit is for us/Don't try to come for us." Her sumptuous harmonies build a protective forcefield: "Some shit," she sings, "you can't touch."
A Seat at the Table's nature is beneficent, but at its spiritual core it is an ode to black women and their healing and sustenance in particular; in writing about herself, Solange turns the mirror back upon them, and crystallizes the kinship therein. She harmonizes with Kelly Rowland and Nia Andrews that "I got so much magic, you can have it," but the song that perhaps best encapsulates this outstanding work is "Scales," a slow-burning duet with Kelela near the end of the album. Their harmonies are heavenly and create almost a meditative effect, a mantra of healing kindness in a syrup-slow synth progression. It's a sex jam, I think, but it can also serve as a shine-theory jam. "You're a superstar," they sing together, letting the "star" part roll around a bit in the lower part of the vibrato. "You're a superstar."
October 05, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Senin, 03 Oktober 2016
Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch
Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch
When the feminist artist Judy Chicago showed her painting Red Flag in 1971, she set the precedent for a subject of art that now has a rich lineage: menstrual blood. Red Flag was a photolithograph that closely depicted a woman removing a used tampon from her vagina. At the time, moon-cycles were so hushed and taboo that Chicago said many people had no idea what they were seeing. Period art has since taken many forms. The disarray of Tracey Emin's 1998 "My Bed" installation included stained underwear. The 13 abstract canvases of Lani Beloso's 2010 "Period Piece" were thickly painted with her own blood. And let us not forget, more recently, the punk singer Meredith Graves mixing her blood into the vinyl of Perfect Pussy's debut record. In 2000, the artist Vanessa Tiegs coined a term for this field: menstrala.
There is a long history of abject art that makes use of corporeal waste. Julia Kristeva articulated this in her book Powers of Horror: "These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands... on the part of death," Kristeva wrote. "There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being." But period blood is different. According to Kristeva, it "threatens the relationship between the sexes" because it "signifies sexual difference." And so, in threatening men, the stigmas surrounding menstrala have not waned. This year, the artist Rupi Kaur posted on Instagram a poised self-portrait with a central red stain—and it was twice removed, "accidentally."
The Norwegian avant-gardist Jenny Hval takes on the possibilities of musical menstrala with Blood Bitch. In an artist's statement, she called Blood Bitch "an investigation of... blood that is shed naturally... the purest and most powerful, yet most trivial, and most terrifying blood." With that, Blood Bitch, her sixth album, deliberately enters two other great traditions: vampire movies and—as with all of Hval's work—the timeless cross-hairs of art and pop.
No contemporary artist sings words like "sublimation," "clitoris," or "soft dick rock" with such enveloping elegance or unfettered ease. On Blood Bitch, Hval continues with her subtle deliveries of "abstract romanticism," "subjectivity," and "speculum." Her voice is at once extremely musical and coolly flat; occasionally, she whispers. On "The Great Undressing," even as Hval makes a cogent metaphor between capitalism and unrequited love ("it never rests"), the yearning in her voice recalls Lana Del Rey. (In 2015, at least once, Hval's touring troupe of singers, dancers, and performance artists did an unusual cover of "Summertime Sadness" that I will not forget.) Hval's "Period Piece" weaves melodies like gorgeous latticework as she describes a sterile scene in a gynecologist's office but turns it into her own personally transcendent experience. "Don't be afraid," she beckons, "it's only blood."
Collaborating again with noise producer Lasse Marhaug, as on 2015's Apocalypse, girl, Hval was drawn to reflect on her roots in Norwegian metal (in interviews, the duo have even noted ties between Darkthrone's black metal classic "Transilvanian Hunger" and Blood Bitch's lush, rolling penultimate track, "Secret Touch"). Though there are patches of harsh noise to be found, Blood Bitch parallels black metal more by its atmospheric nature, how it feels as though the record is thematically all-gravity and yet physically floating. The arrangements employ repetition, with recurring motifs and menacing synths that move in concentric circles. A subtle siren blare anchors "Female Vampire" and carries over "In the Red," replete with the sound of incessant panting, as if someone is running in fear. On the former, Hval sings directly of "a strange slow rhythm, not exactly creating a rhythm, in and out of focus, vulnerable," underscoring the nonlinear textures of Blood Bitch's sound. At its most featherlight, Hval's music is still positively saturated with ideas, all pulp, marrow, and (indeed) blood.
Combined with copious interstitials and its horror premise, Blood Bitch is Hval's most filmic album (which is saying something considering Apocalypse, girl listed characters from Bergman's Persona in the credits) as well as her most conceptual and surreal work. It's also slyly hilarious, adding levity to her repertoire. "The Great Undressing" starts with a meta piece in which Hval's bandmates discuss the record itself—a classic expository scene. (Zia Anger: "What's this album about, Jenny?" Annie Bielski: "It's about vampires." Anger: "No!" Bielski: "Yeah... Well, it's about more things than that...") Hval evokes true modern horrors, not just fantastical ones. On "Ritual Awakening," she sings, "I clutch my phone with my sweaty palm," soon flipping the object as "the coffin for my heart... It's so loud/And I get so afraid." Machines lock us. Whether it's Anger deeming vampires "so basic!" or Hval singing of "useless algorithms," Blood Bitch sounds fiercely present.
Blood Bitch is also more a montage than any of Hval's records. "Untamed Region" includes a sample of the British filmmaker Adam Curtis describing the disorienting power-trip of Russian politics: "It sums up the strange mood of our time," Curtis says alongside choral sighs, "where nothing makes any coherent sense." "Untamed Region" moves into a stately passage in which Hval vulnerably and assuredly dissects her own period, touching the blood. More extreme is "The Plague," which goes from tabla taps to a distressed, vampiric Hval summoning skyward, "I don't know who I am!" It's all cut with horror organs and absurdist dialogue ("Last night I took my birth control with rosé!") before ghastly noise bleeds into a faint dancefloor banger. "The Plague" is like a repository of ideas, as if precisely documenting an active mind.
"Conceptual Romance" is Hval's best and loveliest song, and its genesis point is clear. Hval has often cited Chris Kraus' 1997 theoretical novel I Love Dick as her favorite book. The text celebrates the interior intellectual life of its narrator, a failed experimental filmmaker, in the context of a peculiar love story—she's become obsessed with a man named Dick and she writes letters to him. It began one night, when she believed she had "conceptually fucked" him (through conversation). She turns her fixed "infatuation" into an art project. When Hval sings of her "combined failures," when she sings "I understand infatuation/Rejection/They can connect and become everything/Everything that's torn up in your life," it's like she is writing her own love letter right back to Kraus (which Hval herself affirmed in a recent Wire feature). Hval said she was inspired by karaoke on Apocalypse, girl, and "Conceptual Romance" could be a result. Her most lucid writing casts the spell of dream logic. "Conceptual Romance" is Blood Bitch's lightening bolt moment, but it throbs with grace, like a procession of clouds.
"Why do people still not get it when we [women] handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?" Kraus writes in I Love Dick. It's a fine summation of Hval's music. More than any of the musicians to whom she is often compared (Laurie Anderson, Björk), Hval is a clear disciple of Kraus. On paper, Kraus moves fluidly from reference to reference, dense with ideas; Hval's music is like this, too, and never more than on Blood Bitch. Like I Love Dick—which tends to draw lines, life before reading, life after—it is primarily about female genius and voice. "I need to keep writing because everything else is death," Hval sings on "The Great Undressing," "I'm self-sufficient, mad, endlessly producing." Blood Bitch conveys the visceral euphoria of creation. Blood, it reminds us, is not only a life force—it's where we begin.
October 04, 2016 at 12:00PM
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