Grade: A
After 11 months of impatience and anticipation, the greatest time of the year has finally returned — Halloween season.
Of course, there’s never much of anything to complain about the month of October. The weather is cool, the forestry looks like art, the candy is scrumptious and the spooky movie marathons are to die for.
However, the one aspect of Halloween I feel often gets overlooked is the soundtrack that makes it up.
Think about it. There are hundreds of different Christmas songs you hear in every possible location around the globe the minute Nov. 1 hits, but there are probably only a handful of popular Halloween tunes — “Thriller,” “Monster Mash,” “This is Halloween” and “Werewolves of London.”
Norwegian art pop singer Jenny Hval is one of the few artists today who seems to have some sort of passion for this season’s score, and she shows us this once again with her latest LP “Blood Bitch.”
Even by Scandinavian art pop standards, this is a pretty weird record. Of all the subjects Hval chose to study for her seventh LP, she went with vampires.
This wouldn’t be out of place on a release from some sort of gothic metal band, but Hval? It would be like if Katy Perry began sing about aliens and Kanye rapped about monsters. Oh wait.
The vampire narrative is, fortunately, very subtle and more metaphorical than anything else. The album is primarily an exploration of sexuality, isolation, failure and depression. Think Bat for Lashes meets Björk.
Without a doubt, the most impressive aspect of this album is Hval’s use of instrumentation and sound effects. Her infatuation with heavy synthesizers is evident. They hold more weight on this record than either the guitars, drums or vocals do.
With that said, the other elements of Hval’s band aren’t sidelined by any means. The opening percussion on “The Plague” is mind boggling good. She scatters heavy guitar reverberation throughout this record on songs like “Ritual Awakening” and “In the Red.”
Hval seems to also deeply love using various odd sound effects everywhere on this album. White noise, scribbling, whispers, dripping water, screaming, screeching brakes and anxiety-inducing heavy breathing are just some of the strange noises present all over this LP.
She even uses excerpts from interviews and poetry readings on tracks like “Untamed Region.” On the same track, she also includes audio from a BBC clip of Adam Curtis discussing post-modern politics, interestingly enough.
Hval also manages to find a way to bleed all the songs together into one long flowing narrative like some sort of malicious, paranoid “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” You don’t hear that very often in American music, especially in the pop charts.
Despite probably making some of the best music in the world, most Scandinavian groups in general are relatively unknown to American audiences. Björk is probably the best known, but even she has a very limited set of willing listeners.
Whether or not Hval will break through the mainstream barrier is unlikely, but for those of you looking for a record to capture the horror of the Halloween spirit, there’s no one quite like her.
