Beautiful Freaks 2010-2020

BEAUTIFUL FREAKS
28
What’s this album about, Jenny?
No!
What!?!
It’s about vampires.
Yeah
So opens ‘The Great Undressing’, the sixth song
on Jenny Hval’s Blood Bitch. You’d be forgiven for
responding in the same way Jenny’s friend does in
this skit, tongue-in-cheek describing it as ‘basic’. But
Hval has in fact crafted a dense and atmospheric record
that uses the pervasive vampire mythology to
construct a concept album that’s uncompromising
sonically just as much as politically – and anything
but basic.
First of all, its style is a wild mix of disparate influences,
with artists from Patti Smith to Aphex Twin
in this album’s lineage. Bare vocals, pained wails and
jump-cut field recordings are the uncanny building
blocks her vision builds on and draws from, allowing
it to have all the immediacy and presence that makes
good horror films effective. Its electronic pulse makes
for many a dance-inducing beat (;Female Vampire;
and ‘The Great Undressing’ both have a head-nodding
deep house vibe to them), but with enough unsettling
perturbations to remind you that all is not
well, and you should not forget it. The most distressing
song is ‘The Plague’, a collage of increasingly distraught
recordings. When I listened to it on the bus
the other day I turned the volume on my earphones
right down for fear that someone might overhear its
horrorscape and commit me to the ‘definitely nutty’
section of their mental repository of strangers. At
least, that’s what I’m telling myself – it’s also one of
the most genuinely unnerving songs I’ve heard in a
while and was really starting to creep me out. It’s no
surprise Hval started out as a vocalist in a gothic metal
band. Or perhaps it is, as her current ability to unnerve
seems to surpass many heavy metal theatrics by
tapping into a more instant fear, one that actualises
the much popularised but seldom respected mythos
of the occult.
JENNY HVAL BLOOD BITCH
Vampires, and to a lesser extent witches, the thematic
staples of this album, are fertile ground for Hval’s
areas of artistic interest. The vampire, from Lilith to
Dracula to Edward Cullen, has always had a heavily
sexual and gendered dimension (as has the witch!),
and so serves as a projection of social attitudes towards
gender and sexuality: just look at blood-sucking,
a mixing of bodily fluids with a penetrator over-
- by Max Bastow -
powering the penetrated; or the vampire’s methods,
which inevitably revolve around some form of more
or less overt seduction. Thus, stories involving vampires
frequently expose the sexist, patriarchal core of
society – Lilith’s initial crime was thinking herself
equal to man, for hell’s sake (with the added sexual
dimension of her “refusing to lie underneath Adam
during sex”). Hval, here as in her other work, sure
doesn’t shy away from overtly sexual content or from
challenging widespread patriarchal beliefs, so what
better lore to tap into?
I’d argue, in fact, that this mythology provides an anchor
onto which her beliefs and ideas are attached in
a more concrete way than ever before: her previous
coinage of ‘soft dick rock‘, for example, was never
described more usefully than as ‘anti-capitalist sexuality’;
it sure is an eyebrow-raising expression, but
it doesn’t really get me much further to connecting
with her ideals. “This blood bitch’s tale“, on the other
hand, allows an immediate point of ingress. And far
from tying her progressive feminism down in attaching
it to a traditionally chauvinistic folklore, it gives
it power in defining it by its very subversion of such
tales. Where Jenny might have been cautious about
wandering from abstraction in the past, it’s clear she
now sees it as necessary, with a choice sample of documentary
mastermind Adam Curtis’ short Oh Dearism
II (take 5 minutes to watch it!) explaining how in becoming
more confusing the world of politics and the
media becomes inaccessible to the average member of
public, and any opposition is neutralised by simply
avoiding definition: you can’t be opposed to a belief if
you don’t know what that belief is. Ironic, then, that
as Curtis picks the example of Vladislav Surkov to
show how politicians are assimilating the post-modern
confusion of the art world, Hval, an artist, moves
distinctly away from such disorienting concepts to a
more grounded philosophy – the sort one would once
have expected from politicians. Confusing!
You certainly won’t want to play it at
dinner parties or during sex.
Hval’s specific use of vampirism here seems to be as
a complex metapahor for the frustrations of being a
woman – a topic I admit I’m not best placed to speak
about, and which I hope female reviewers will touch
upon. Vampirism is something which is inflicted upon
Hval’s protagonist, and that creates sexual desires,
causes pain, and involves a lot of blood. A vampire/
woman ambiguity is maintained throughout, with a
notable passage from ‘Untamed Region’ (its title full