29th October - Frida Hyvönen's Silence is Wild

Artist – Album: Frida Hyvönen – Silence is Wild

Released: 29^th October 2008

Sounds Like: Swede soul music

 
Bugger! Bugger bugger bugger. It seems that in my eagerness to listen to Pulp I clean skipped a day! Silly me. Still, first time it’s happened in 303 days, that’s not too bad a record I feel… Today’s post is for yesterday, yesterday’s has been updated to today (haha, make sense??):
 
The thing is, this is hardly a forgettable record. There may be a large number of singer-songwriters out there, but there are few like the kooky Swede Frida Hyvönen. Blessed with a gorgeously icy voice (best heard on this Judee Sill cover), Hyvönen writes personal lyrics, stuffed with poetic imagery and extended metaphors, and crafts them around her basic piano-led music. When it works, it is marvellous – album opener ‘Dirty Dancing’ is easily the strongest of the set (and actually one of my favourites from the whole year), weaving a tale of two past lovers who are reunited years down the line around a ‘Be My Baby’-inspired chorus. The album doesn’t always hit those heights (and the wailing chorus of ‘Highway 2 U’ is almost comical), but each song is likely to have something of interest: from the seemingly autobiographical lyrics of ‘My Cousin’ and ‘December’ to the bustling tribute to our capital ‘London!’, a city she has a real love-hate relationship with.  
 
‘Birds’, despite sounding a little unfinished, might be the song that indicates the direction Hyvönen will head to next, as it shuns the piano and embraces a more electronic sound. The lyrics too become more repetitive and less convoluted (i.e. more like a pop song), and in all it feels like the least solo effort on the record. Then again, trying to second guess a singer as individual and unique as Frida Hyvönen is probably about as clever an idea as posting that bloody Pulp post yesterday.
 
Albumaday... rating: 7/10
 

1.       Dirty Dancing – 4:06

2.       Enemy Within – 3:48

3.       Highway 2 U – 4:09

4.       London! – 4:03

5.       My Cousin – 2:57

6.       Science – 3:32

7.       Scandinavian Blonde – 2:05

8.       December 4:05

9.       Birds – 2:50

10.   Pony – 3:05

11.   Sic Transit Gloria – 4:08

12.   Oh Shanghai – 5:42

13.   Why Do You Love Me So Much – 3:12

 
Listen to ‘Dirty Dancing’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLiLCAq3zLk

Also released on 29^th October:

2003: José Gonzàlez – Veneer