Jenny Hval @ Gullivers, Manchester, 11 June

Live Review by Chris Ogden | 17 Jun 2015

Trust Jenny Hval to subvert the trend. Her last visit to Manchester, in support of Swans last year, saw her with a full band set-up in support of her angular second album, Innocence Is Kinky. Her latest record, Apocalypse, girl, however, is a loftier affair, both in sound and spirit. Tonight’s show has no lack of imagination either, as Hval eschews her instruments for some multimedia performance art, taking to the stage in a luxurious pink wig and supported by two similarly “glamorous” assistants who whirl expressionlessly around her and pose for selfies in Photobooth.

Opening with the translated poem Kingsize and the pillowy Take Care of Yourself, Hval’s elastic voice coos and stretches through dreamy swathes of synth, reaching operatic heights amid the luxurious strings of show highlight Heaven. She is a seraph in a bombsite of endless distraction, marked by an unsettling stage-side video, which shows one of her companions performing fellatio on a dangling orange chain. With the crowd dumbstruck by the show’s bizarreness, Hval occasionally punctures the overawed silence between songs to laugh-out-loud effect, most hilariously when the backdrop flickers to a karaoke screen and her helpers launch into an intentionally woeful rendition of Toni Braxton’s Un-Break My Heart.

When Hval discards her Ariel wig during The Battle Is Over’s gospel shuffle to reveal her androgynous shock of blonde hair, it is a powerful moment, a striking rejection of the consumerism that the song caustically questions. As a serene sky drifts behind her, she whispers the whole of closer Holy Land in an intimate embrace with one of her dancers; the effect is deeply humanising. Hval’s avant-garde delivery already marks her out as one of the most distinctive musicians right now. It is her willingness to explore cultural attitudes that most pop artists gloss over which also makes her so entirely necessary. [Chris Ogden]

http://jennyhval.com