Silence may be wild, but it’s not an adjective you’d necessarily apply to balladess Frida Hyvönen. ‘Quirky’ perhaps, or ‘melodramatic,’ but ‘wild’? Nah. But that’s not to denigrate the Swedish songstress, for what she’s lacking in edge she mostly compensates for with an idiosyncratic lyrical approach and a fine line in lush melodies.
The most striking element of the album is the lyrical content, which eschews the hackneyed rhyming couplets of many singer-songwriters for a conversational style at odds with her grandiose musical arrangements. More well-crafted short stories than expressions of generic platitudes about love and loss, they give a sense of emotional authenticity to these seemingly autobiographical tales, and at her best she displays a vein of rich wit worthy of her former touring partner Jens Lekman. But occasionally there’s a sense she tries a little too hard, her stream-of-consciousness approach coming across as too self-knowing, pat- even cringeworthy. Take these sample lines from ‘Dirty Dancing’, an endearingly kitsch piano ballad that appropriates the clattering castanets and female harmonies of a 50’s girl group, which does so well until those last, wincingly clumsy two lines:
“He was my older brother’s friend and had a light around him
that would chase off any winter
He had no father and his mother seemed younger than ours
And he was a dancer
He had the keys to a place where we could practice
It felt almost like Dirty Dancing
Minus the United States and instead of a resort
it was the Folkets Hus basement”
But if you can overlook the occasional clanger of a line, there’s much to enjoy here. ‘London!’ is a fine example of Hyvönen at her best, a tongue-in-cheek love letter (of sorts) to the capital delivered with a certain show-stopping quality, drenched with harmonies and vocal showboating. The gloriously unsubtle ‘Highway 2 U’’s title may have the unfortunate air of a Celine Dion B-side but it’s also quite touching thanks to the injured, haunting quality of her vocals, and the ethereal synth/choir combo of ‘Enemy Within’ is cute, if a little too reminiscent of Hulk Hogan’s poignant early 90’s classic ‘Hulkster in Heaven’ for my liking. Unfortunately the formula wears a little thin at times, especially towards the latter end of the album, with some songs drifting precariously close to blustery MOR territory. There’s still the odd nice touch- the light-hearted lo-fi synths of ‘Birds’ are a breath of fresh air, and the glockenspiels and sleighbells of ‘Oh Shanghai’ add some prettiness to an otherwise drab melody- but one suspects she’s used her most potent lyrical salvos earlier on in the record. A shame, as this album holds a lot of promise, and certainly marks her out from the many nice-but-bland female singer-songwriters flooding the scene but its peculiar affectedness too often comes across as a weakness rather than a strength.
73%
mp3:> Frida Hyvönen: ‘Enemy Within’
Related posts
Other albums by this artist
For me, this album is a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, but it’s overwhelmed in the end by the latter. It’s agonisingly, embarassingly kitsch and cheesy at times – particularly “Highway 2 U” and “Dirty Dancing” with its awful shoe-horned-in cultural references and bizarre lyrics.
There are a few tracks I like though – “London!” is one of the best songs of the year so far for me, and “Birds” and “Scandinavian Blonde” are great too. But overall, it’s a tough album to listen to – too often it’s dull or embarassing. The new A Camp album is where it’s at when it comes to Swedish songstresses, I think.
i totally agree with the lyrics to ‘dirty dancing’ being clangers.
i think it’s a fantastic slice of observational/story telling writing. and you have to remember, she’s swedish – so her english is always going to be a little bit skewed. that’s in fact on of the main reasons i love this and lots of other scandi-pop records.
yeah. id give this record a 85% easily.
and a 100% for the cover art.
Yeah, I’m with Andy – this, for me, is one of the most over-rated albums of the year so far, and I know we’re only a month in.
The Music is a bit uninspiring and the lyrics just grate with me – if english is a struggle for her, then perhaps she’d be better off singing in swedish…
I haven’t listened to this yet but I’m planning to, I loved her first album.
@hughes
no im not saying that she struggles with english. but any swedish artist (or european for that matter) obviously has a way with the english language. like quirky mannerisms.
all opinion though. i think this is a really special record.
I just love this artist. love this album. And this thing about her lyrics being corny or incorrect or whatever: that’s the point! It’s meant to sound like swenglish, that swedish accent and the superswedish pronounciation of swedish names and places are’nt a failure – it makes the entire album even better, I’d say. More personal, more vulnerable.
This is a vulnerable, naked album. As a matter of fact, I would even say that the emptiness in her voice makes it even more expressful and soulful.
my comment above (i totally agree with the lyrics to ‘dirty dancing’ being clangers.) – is a typo..
it should have said totally DISagree.
so it’s time for me to say it once again. i <3 this record.