20. Jenny Hval - Viscera
The minimalistic guitar notes and sparse machine noises open 'Engine In The City', then the sexually charged couplet: “I arrived in town/with an electric toothbrush/pressed against my clitoris.”
This is the beginning of Viscera, and it sets the stark tone for a darkly surreal yet equally beautiful trip. Dropping her Rocket To The Sky moniker, the Norwegian native’s first set under her own name channels the spirit of folk reverence; her voice gently plaintive in in abstract poetics or ringing with crystalline beauty in bright harmonies.
Her music is warped with arch experimentalism, her songs as sensual as they are provocative, as likely to unspool into a sea of noise as they are ascend into a delicate ether. The majority of them unwind slowly over six to eight minutes, like a strange new flower blossoming, but always with a charged sense of character, narrative or emotional effect. Truly a singer-songwriter for (and of) the modern age.
This is the beginning of Viscera, and it sets the stark tone for a darkly surreal yet equally beautiful trip. Dropping her Rocket To The Sky moniker, the Norwegian native’s first set under her own name channels the spirit of folk reverence; her voice gently plaintive in in abstract poetics or ringing with crystalline beauty in bright harmonies.
Her music is warped with arch experimentalism, her songs as sensual as they are provocative, as likely to unspool into a sea of noise as they are ascend into a delicate ether. The majority of them unwind slowly over six to eight minutes, like a strange new flower blossoming, but always with a charged sense of character, narrative or emotional effect. Truly a singer-songwriter for (and of) the modern age.
