Review Summary: getting paid, getting laid, getting married, getting acquainted
This one still hangs around – maybe it’s even permanently etched somewhere – in the back of my head. I can’t be quite certain of how it came to be a tenant, just as I’m not sure there exists a conceptual axis that grounds Hval’s postulations about both the world around her, and the world inside her. As far as inveterate reference points go, this one is an anomaly; though it’s made an indelible mark, I’m still on the outside looking in.
When I read plane’s
Viscera review, all those years ago (I may not be here if it wasn’t for that review, now then I’m deeply indebted [thank you kind sir]) it made observable new avenues with which to approach music, in terms of “philosophical resonance” – as he put it – and what constitutes a ‘song’. At risk of applying the same, cogent points to a new context, I’ve been trying (perhaps fruitlessly) to appraise
Apocalypse, girl from a different angle. That is: this record is unequivocally and specifically feminine in its evaluation of sex, of self-love, of consciousness and humanity. More specifically, there is no way this record can be evaluated from an androgynous perspective.
Maybe I’m misconstruing, and this angle has, in fact, been covered before. After all, this album is immersed in so many abstractions that it’s an abstraction in itself. Hval buries her ideas amidst the layers of consciousness that exist in her surreal and atmospheric soundscapes, until her voice rises above to deliver a scathing indictment, or an evocative statement upon which to base your own thesis.
“It’s biology; it’s my own fault” subverts she, and the sardonic tone does not go amiss – it comes across as an eloquently articulated argument for embracing feminine identity and against post-feminist rhetoric.
If there’s one thing I adore especially about plane’s review, it’s how he analyses Hval’s considered application of language. At this point (and past it, into
Blood Bitch territory) her manipulation of meaning is a standard, a fundamental characteristic of her creative output. It strikes me how the use of words like ‘cunt’ and ‘dick’, throughout the record, are once again so far removed from notions of vulgarity; at least, they’re posited in such a way that social obloquy cannot touch them. In the negative space between these words, one is provoked into considering their biological significance, as opposed to their societal significance.
Sexuality and biology are, of course, linked to the same kind of femininity that Hval has engendered on other albums and on other days. But
Apocalypse, girl seems to scrutinize femininity through the lens of an out-of-body experience; the corporeal form sitting across itself, studying and consoling in equal measure; the metaphysical married with the physiological. When fantasies of dogs and horses are positioned contiguously with one’s idea of identity, Hval is able to examine herself in the same way that a listener would: detached, from an alien perspective, as though the inverse of what plane suggests she does on
Viscera.
And so this relationship is mutually beneficial – I get beautiful music, and an opportunity to try and understand/empathise with a uniquely feminine approach to self-discovery, while Hval gets a chance to apply her selfhood to a range of different contexts in order to come to terms with it. Now excuse me, while I get myself in trouble for inadvertently singing
“metal spikes embrace my spine, my face, my cunt“ around a loitering group of schoolchildren on my way to getting my phone fixed.
