Frida Hyvönen
(Secretly Canadian)
On her second album, the Swedish singer-songwriter Frida Hyvönen applies her clear, dulcet voice and melodically muscular piano to 13 English-language compositions that sound both confessional and mysterious. It's like Tori Amos' early work, only more schooled in pop and even show-tune structure and less inclined to wander off into self-indulgence. Or, at its best, like Kate Bush.
It is also produced and arranged with a sense of restrained grandeur by Jari Haapalinen - just check out the way a song like "London!" kicks off at its chorus, after a quiet verse, with the soaring, circling, back-up vocals and the powerful drumming. The gorgeous opener, "Dirty Dancing," has poetic, precisely descriptive lyrics about her and the young boy with whom she practiced dance moves in the basement of a Swedish house, and who as an adult became a chimney sweep and one day came to clean her house: "And when I touched his sweeper's arm with my piano finger/He said: ‘Watch, Frida, your hands will get dirty/And I felt like I had a fever." Discussion groups could spend days on that. Melodically, that song has a girl-group chorus right out of Linda Scott or Kathy Young and the Innocents. On the spare "December," about going for an abortion, the attention to minute detail is overpowering. It's smart and carefully crafted, but never clever or coy.
You can tell Hyvönen wants her songs to connect and be understood. She is as strong a songwriter as anyone working today.
Standout tracks: "Dirty Dancing," "Oh Shanghai" STEVEN ROSEN
