It's not going to come straight away. And I don't even know why. But, for
whatever reason, the real genius of this Jenny Wilson album isn't revealed
with any immediacy.
She's enjoyable from the get-go: a peculiar kind of
indie princess with a voice as strange and snarly as Roisin Murphy's,
playing melancholy pop-music that mixes and matches gentle acoustic guitar
with low-key keytone, gently evoking varying eras — girl-group,
proto-electro, disco, new-wave — whilst never owing a debt to any time,
place, or person. There's an easy in because she sang on The Knife's
Berlin-baiting ballad "You Take My Breath Away," and those kids've already
gone and delivered dollops of Sweden's milky musical goodness unto the
world at large. And "Love Ain't Just a Four-Letter Word" is a pop song of
such splendor, big and brassy and stand-up and stupendous, and featuring a
sung inquiry — "have you ever read a newspaper, baby?" — that's the
archetypal German ohrwurm in action, a lyrical hook that gets its claws in, then
burrows deep.
And, in what must rank as one of the greatest musical moments
in television history, she's gone live on some Swedish pop-music TV show,
and, in league with Sweden's queen-of-pop, Robyn, done a dueting cover of
Saul Williams' fist-up polemic "List of Demands," recasting it, from behind
a piano, with a sweet pushbeat. Yet, as her gear gets its release outside of
Sweden, I'm wondering how many will have the grace and patience to go beyond
its initial sheen; will scratch its retro-electro/Grace-Jones-homage
façade and get blood beneath their fingernails.
For Jenny Wilson hasn't
just made a nice pop song, or even a nice pop record. She's made an album
sweet and sour, sad and glad; strange and smart and smart-ass and utterly
silly; proud and profound; with depth to its meaning and meaning in its
feeling.
She's also made an album with more references to shoes than Carl
Perkins ever managed; the video clip for the super-snappy single "Let My
Shoes Lead Me Forward" perhaps points towards a fondness for footwear
bordering on fetish. Fore'er en artistic pointe, Wilson's dancing shoes and
disco boots lead her forward through songs that feel like fun frolics
first-up, but grow more melancholy with each spin around the floor. Wilson
pirouettes through a disc whose doleful disco billows with a Northern fog,
her electro-tone less a portrait of cold-war paranoia than of the cold
Swedish winter, amounting to an opaque evocation of the teenaged wasteland,
her fog an adolescent fug. Lost adrift amidst this mist, spinning circles
back through memory bliss, Wilson's flighty voice hits wuthering heights,
caroling lyrics that tap into a slightly salty vein of small-town isolation.
Her lyrics speak of being in love and young in a world in which Love and
Youth are held aloft as the ultimate qualities, and yet having neither thing
mean a thing; of being held prisoner by age and feelings, feeling like
you've "gotta meet a boy to fall in love with quick" or your life will
continue its slide into an abyss of meaninglessness; yearning to "go
someplace" or "fall in love" — and really, anyone and anywhere will do.
Wilson knows that the prison of high school is essentially psychological,
that institutionalization is the biggest fear at an institution whose only
place for hope and aspirations is in the last pages of the school yearbook,
the songsmith essentially painting adolescent angst as "A Hesitating Cloud
of Despair." Titling her songs, like poems, with lines from within, Wilson
grants them handles that read like the names of Raymond Carver stories
("Summer Time — The Roughest Time," "Bitter? No, I Just Love to Complain," "Hey,
What's the Matter?"), and her texts live up to such christening.
Wilson writes with a sweetness of delivery and a sourness of pen; her
turns of phrase as not-quite-right as to-the-syllable tight. Awkward lines
like "at least 10,000 spoons and forks and knifes and plates" and "rip off
your clothes, all you wanna do is screw" and "pretty sure my jeans are too
tight" stick out at odd, oddly-phrased angles, but invariably stick
with you.
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