The Singles Jukebox

“Last night I asked David Cameron for permission to watch people fucking on my computer” just doesn’t scan, you know?

[Video][Website]
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Brad Shoup: Here’s the cop-out: Hval’s lusty tone poems work best as an album-length approach. Whether here or as Rockettothesky, she works the intersection of PJ Harvey, Yoko Ono and Lou Reed. She’s the fl?neuse taking inward strolls, experiencing the messy friction between biology and desire and impulse. “Innocence Is Kinky” employs the full range of her vocal approaches: sotto voce narration and a jazzy note-path and a cry from the heels. Centering is provided by a dusky riff’s second half, like a conversation abruptly entered. Around it, Hval sketches a story about distanced desire, and the ways we internalize and process the sex that suffuses.
[8]

Anthony Easton: She seems to think that by speak singing at a slowed down pace, though a thicket of electronic noise, she is saying deep things about technological isolation and her sadness. She is not. 
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Tara Hillegeist: I am so used to the godawful embarrassment that the “consent is sexy!” crowd inspires in me that, from a first glance at the title and having no context for Hval beyond “plays with popcult; is Norwegian; is political” I was expecting an EDM-squawky robo-bubblegum abomination, the sort of politically “conscious” misfire that nearly a decade ago got albums like Gustav’s Rettet Die Wale slathered over by self-conscious critical nabobs.  Instead I got a song that seems devoted to inspiring the apex of penile terror at its every available opportunity. Stabbing go the synths. Biting come the vocals. Smiling goes me. Instead of a memory of mediocre synthetic agit-pop, we have a tribute to the sonic cutting of Yoko Ono; like Ono, Hval uses silence like a scalpel. (Her skill with a knife of perfectly-placed silence may, in fact, be her greatest weapon.) It cuts to heal. I like you, Jenny Hval. I’m going to buy your album.
[8]

John Seroff: I am doubtful the current music ecosystem can (will? should?) support a more precocious Laurie Anderson.  I am fairly certain I can’t.
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Iain Mew: EMA meets Black Box Recorder was my first thought in trying to place a framework for where the hell this came from, which is testament to the wide range of expressive modes Hval fits in. There’s also something that reminds me of Pulp’s “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E” in its sexual obsession and introspective focus on imagined or remembered images. Jenny Hval directs “Innocence is Kinky” even more inwards though, everything hermetically sealed to the point where even her whisper seems more than the oppressive atmosphere can take. It’s hit-and-miss but never less than fascinating and the tension sometimes skin-crawling, in a good kind of way. Not least the way she makes the word “Macbooks” sound like an ancient terror. Once she finally lets out the full roar and starts ripping eyes out it’s actually a let down.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: If even a tenth of the thought expended on how “Blurred Lines” is or isn’t kosher was instead devoted to artists like Jenny Hval, who actually blur lines, we’d all have better debates and probably better sex. The easiest way to listen to songs like “Innocence is Kinky” is for the instrumental — here, the sort of nocturnal pulse it’s easy while listening to imagine lies fecund in the earth at the edge of the city. Then comes the voice. Hval’s master thesis was on “the singing voice as literature,” and until someone JSTORs me a copy and translation (no, please do this, if you’re by chance some Norwegian Aaron Swartz) I can only observe. Hval cries out (rather like Sandra Lockwood, for the two people who’ll get that) for emphasis, lilts melodies as a tease, drops in and out of intelligibility like a questionably reliable narrator. For the B-section, her voice becomes a trancelike, fluting soprano — Alison Goldfrapp in Seventh Tree comes to mind. It’s pretty and drifty enough to distract you from how Hval is singing about taking off her torso; once your attention’s wavered there comes a sudden stammer, breaking up the lyric and reminding you it’s a controlled drift — a lull then strike, precisely executed, sexual without being sexualized. The same goes for the actual literature, Hval feeling out visceral images like she’s feeling desire and simultaneously watching it through the MIT dream recorder. Whether you agree likely correlates with how interesting you find this sort of feminine mythology, but I recommend trying. Innocence is kinky, sure; that’s the whole point of that “I’ll take a good girl” line. (Christ, this is not hard.) Taking yourself seriously is kinkier.
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Alfred Soto: Although Hval’s austerity makes Savages look like Miley Cyrus, she’s beholden to monochromes, here in the form of spoken-word sex twaddle over spook guitar. There’s more wisdom in thinking kinky is innocence, to be honest.
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