On each of her albums, Jenny Hval thoroughly examines what it means to be an artist, but on Classic Objects, she explores what it means to be herself. Like so many other people, during the COVID-19 global pandemic and its ensuing lockdowns Hval's life shrank down to a simple day-to-day existence -- a challenging situation for an artist and performer who shares their work with the outside world and, in turn, draws inspiration from it. For her 4AD debut, Hval used her simpler existence as a self-described "private person" as source material for a set of songs so intimate and expansive that they feel like shared memories. Rather than a simplification of her music, Classic Objects feels like a distillation of it. Unlike many artists who used stripped-down acoustic or rock-based sounds to express the feeling of getting back to basics in the wake of the pandemic, Hval borrows the sounds of globally inspired '80s pop like Rhythm of the Saints and the devotional music of Alice Coltrane and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to capture the rapturous engagement with moments in everyday life that make up the album's heart. On "Cemetery of Splendor," she details her surroundings -- pinecones, gum, cigarette butts -- with bubbling joy over mesmerizing percussion and bass. "Jupiter" begins as a pop song driven by a beat that's a dead ringer for Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" before taking on a cosmic scope as it floats off on massive electronic drones. Like her previous album The Practice of Love, Classic Objects' music often feels more welcoming than might be expected, but Hval's observations are, as always, rigorous and swift-moving. Her songwriting feels particularly immersive this time around, and filled with writerly detail that makes the ordinary feel extraordinary. "Year of Love" recounts a marriage proposal that happened at one of her shows, rooting the song in concrete imagery that lets its searching mood take flight; "American Coffee" is even more surreal, tracing a loose line from Hval's birth to her time living in Australia with nurses who suddenly quote French philosopher Gilles Deleuze ("A concept is a brick/It can be used to build a courthouse of reason/Or it can be thrown through the window"). Moments like these have an intuitive flow thanks to Hval's light touch and her skill at crystallizing her concepts into songs that are felt as much as they're understood. That ability may very well be at its peak on Classic Objects; on songs as different as the poignant protest song "Freedom" and the title track's winding musings on existence and creativity, it's both comforting and thrilling to hear Hval breathe life into the everyday so fully.
© Heather Phares /TiVo