JENNY HVAL at the Rivoli, Friday, September 27. Rating: NNN
A small crowd came out to the Rivoli for the Toronto stop on Jenny Hval’s first North American tour, and the under-the-radar Oslo-based multidisciplinary artist immediately set to work challenging us with her avant-garde experimentalism.
Her high voice is beautiful and striking, and she uses it for so much more than just delivering pretty melodies. It pummels us with surreal, seemingly stream-of-conscious lyrics, and grows into pained yelps and banshee yodels.
Beneath the wild vocals, the music drones and pulsates, expands and contracts. It would be fairly inert save for the inventive accompaniment of Hval’s two bandmates, a drummer who finds seriously interesting ways to play his cymbals and a guitarist who sometimes uses a bow and can make his chords shimmer and cascade.
The set list drew heavily from Hval’s recent Innocence Is Kinky, a provocative album with frank lyrics about sex and gender. It draws you in and then repels you, a cyclical dynamic that was also at work at the Rivoli. Despite Hval’s warm and friendly banter, a sort of stunned silence arose between songs, and some people left partway through.
