Lost Girls - Selvuttsletter

 

Doing this on a daily basis for over ten tears now I tend to treat this blog as something of a job, I don't want to come across as po faced on any level here all 'Pitchfork', because that organisation is pretty much the antithesis of everything I try to do, but I wouldn't keep going on the ultimately quite thankless task of writing a blog, (not that I'm, after sympathy)  if I wasn't in some respects 'serious' about what I'm doing here. I'm serious about music, its importance. Certainly its centrality to me.

So I trawl through the new record realeases each Friday with genuine intent. What am I going to write about in the coming week? Yesterday I decided early that I wasn't remotely interested in the album that the industry itself is primarily interested in at the moment. The return of The Rolling Stones after many years away as a recording proposition. I'm not frankly interested in new Rolling Stones records as they make their way into the Eighties. There's plenty left in their 'old' records to keep me going. I don't really see the point of what they do now.

There's plenty else that interests me more and I'm sure I'll experience more enjoyment and pleasure exploring. Selvutsletter, the latest from Jenny Hval and Havard Volden as Lost Girls, their nom de guerre for example. Its' a pretty serious venture immediately. Both Hval and Volden are Norwegian and come across as essentially serious in the way that much art from that part of the world does. Ingemar Bergman, Murder Mysteries. Even ABBA in their way. I don't like to apply regional stereotyping but sometimes it does serve a purpose and is valid.

 Selvutsletter is certainly serious business. It comes across as an act of scientific investigation as much as a purely musical enterprise. Hval and Volden are just as much artists as musicians and what they achieve as Lost Girls is impressive in its scope and range and merits earnest discussion. Yes, the kind of thing Pitchfork was established to do.

I'm not going too do that fully here. It's the weekend, and anyway I've got other records I want to listen to and write about here. Anyhow, I'm enjoying my first spin of Selvutsletter very much ineed, early on Saturday and will be back for another play later on today. It definitely strikes me as an album that will reward investment royally.