Fancy a quick look behind the curtain? A glance into the magicians’ circle? A unobstructed look up the wizard’s sleeve?
I kind of wasn’t going to bother with the Lost Girls’ second album?? I mean, I bothered to an extent: I bought the album digitally the day it came out, because I’m the last person in the world just buying albums because I like to financially support artists I consider incredibly important but that I worry about their work being financially rewarding in late stage capitalism. It’s bullshit, I know, and Bandcamp is about to be stripped for parts, because it’s a gross company like all the other gross companies, but it makes me feel better. Oh, and artists like Olivia Rodrigo who are too big a deal to ever have a Bandcamp page? Yeah, I torrent that shit. We don’t have time to discuss all of this now, what I mean by not bothering is that I wasn’t going to bother putting it on the list this year.
It was Jenny Hval’s last album, ‘Classic Objects‘, that really made me question my continued fandom. It was good. But, like… also nothing? Impressive soundscapes and ambient, stream of conscious poetry, but now raw and jagged edges for me to actually get a hold of, whatever pleasures or excitement I gleaned from it would be fleeting as it slipped out of my hands. Bear in mind that 2019’s ‘The Practice of Love’ had already got me writing that “Ms. Hval’s latest isn’t this high completely on its own merits… I’ve tried my damnedest with ‘The Practice of Love’… Yet I still never completely fell for her latest album”. Even if I was a fan of their side hustle Lost Girls’ debut album – even if, again, not a coo-coo bananas tits out for the pope level of fan – I was already aware of NE2023’s truncated size and just imagined ‘Selvutsletter’ wouldn’t quite cut the løkurt. Also, it was released in October. October! Do you have any idea how many albums I already have to consider by that point in the year?? I start writing this piece of shit in December and you want me to properly consider and rate a record as layered and as subtle as ‘Selvutsletter’ would obviously be?? I listened a couple of times, nothing jumped out at me, I moved on. I’m a busy man.
Then, as the list got closer to having to be finalised, so I gave it another listen just to confirm that it wouldn’t be considered, and…
Like, you’ve read Alan Moore’s ‘Lost Girls’, right? I mean, you really should have, it’s where the band get their name from so I would consider it vital pre-reading. Anyway, this album had me like Dorothy, y’know?
Yeah? Yeah?? You get me?? Are you with me, reader? Yeah, you are…
OK, so I haven’t really read ‘Lost Girls’ in a really long time, if you delete the word ‘really’ from that sentence and replace ‘in a really long time’ with ‘ever’. Actually, you can just delete ‘in a really long time’ as well, the sentence would probably flow much better then. OK, so I haven’t read ‘Lost Girls’. Took away the italics there as well. But I get the general gist of it, yeah? Wendy from ‘Peter Pan’? Alice from ‘Alice in Wonderland’? Dorothy from the ‘Wizard of Oz’? All screwin’?
Vis a vis: Lost Girls, the duo made up of Jenny Hval and longtime multi-instrumentalist collaborator Håvard Volden. All screwin’. Norwegian Wood, ammi right? I’m glad we’re now all on the same page.
But ‘Selvutsletter’ – a Norwegian word the band themselves translate as “self-effacer: Someone who tries to erase themselves. Someone who is cleaning out themselves. Performing exorcism. Or perhaps just getting older, less interested in their own present self.” – is something else. I kind of thought I got Lost Girls’ whole thing, you know? We all did! Their whole bad was wilfully uncommercial improvisation sometimes seemingly randomly edited into fifteen minute songs. Which is how we wants it and how we gets it! Yet somehow on their second album the duo manage to compress all of these ideas, all of these ad-libbed flights of fancy, into more concise and musically comprehensive standard length gems. Some of these tracks have, like, a chorus and shit.
And I’ve only just scratched the surface! If I love the record this much after barely 8 weeks feeding it into that chute that leads to my soul, how high would it be if I’d spent months with it? The record seems to fall off slightly in the latter half, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t given these pieces of magic time to properly fester in my brain, like some beautiful Norwegian fungus.
Honestly, I never expected an artist as consistently impossible to expect as Hval to do something so unexpected.
2021 #45 (Lost Girls), 2022 #43, 2019 #31, 2016 =6 (Jenny Hval)
Necessary Evil 
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