Frida Hyvonen
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Until Death Comes, Hyvonen’s first record, came out last year in Sweden and a couple weeks ago here in the States. It could be the Swedish equivalent of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, full of clear-eyed tales of a hard-thinking girl who hops in and out of bed, drinks some, enjoys herself or doesn’t, believes in romance — and clearly knows the price of all her choices. Until Death Comes doesn’t titillate like Guyville did, though — Phair’s perfectly crisp enunciation of words like “cunt” and “fuck” gave her record a calculated 900-number feel, but Hyvonen doesn’t seem too interested in the possibility that a woman singing dirty words could get a rise out of people. Plus her record’s more casual about its autobiographical tone (read: untouched by shame or guilt). Maybe in Sweden a woman who writes a song about getting drunk and hooking up with a friend doesn’t have to handle the topic like a live grenade.
Guest musicians pop up here and there, but for most of the album Hyvonen just accompanies herself on piano, playing with the freshness and unself-consciousness of an amateur who’s still in the “I can do anything!” stage of learning an instrument. She tends to alternate like a seesaw between left hand and right — her parts are rarely more complicated than “Chopsticks” — and the songs themselves are so bare-bones they sound like the little tunes a carousel plays. Her voice is plain and bright, and she hasn’t got any tricks. But the melodies are very pretty, and despite the sparseness of the music, the lyrics don’t overwhelm it; instead the two elements click together, the deft simplicity of one balancing the emotional complexity of the other.
