Jenny Hval - Innocence is Kinky (2013) [FLAC]

  Released: 2013
  Genre: Pop/Rock 
  Style: Indie Folk
  Country: Norway
  Source: CD (log + cue)
  Codec: FLAC
  Bit Rate: ~ 800 kbps
  Bits Per Sample: 16
  Sample Rate: 44,100 Hz

 'Something happens when you say "I" in a song, that can't happen in a book', declares Jenny Hval, who's known in her native Norway both as a musician (both under her own name, the moniker Rockettothesky, and with the duo Nude On Sand) and as a published novelist and media commentator. Her songs – featuring frequently explicit language – explore subjectivity and sensuality and experiment with male perspectives and voices. But don't call her music 'confessional', as that implies guilt and sinfulness, and Jenny makes no apology for who she is or what she's thinking. As she challenges: 'How much subject can you take?' 

  Jenny Hval's previous, acclaimed Rune Grammofon album Viscera (2011), recorded with her own free rock trio, overflowed with intimate detail and surrealistic bodily imagery. Innocence Is Kinky – which also features a string section led by avant garde composer Ole-Henrik Moe – was produced in Bristol, England by PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, who helped bring out the intimate qualities of her lyrics and sharpened her improvisational tendencies. 'It was a very easy collaboration..."

  Like contemporaries such as Julia Holter and Laurel Halo, she's weaving spellbinding new forms of intelligent, experimental pop with injections from mythology, theory, gender politics and improvisation. You can also trace her no-holds-barred streams of consciousness and unorthodox subject matter back to earlier heroes such as Einstürzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld (her title puns on their LP Silence Is Sexy), Patti Smith, Michael Gira, Nick Cave and Kate Bush, whose praises Jenny recently sung in a lecture on the female voice. 'Anything that comes from a woman's mouth is a confession, and that's looked down upon,' she says. 'On "I Got No Strings", I'm writing about the impossibility of becoming an equal, female subject or finding an equal voice – the old idea that the male subject is "universal" and the female subject is "specifically female".'