The Long Sleep [EP]

From murky ambience to noise, free jazz, and beyond, Hval deploys sounds with a careful attention to feeling, building lush collages with a strategic intent further amplified in the lyrics. While ultimately smaller and less ambitious than her previous full-lengths, The Long Sleep grasps at ideas about presence, affect, and influence, recognizing the important potential of networks of all types in the lives of all who listen.

The Long Sleep is more concerned with the lifecycle, the existential, and, in parts, is more sonically expansive.

The four-track offering is a rather wild journey, in that it refuses to offer anything up easily. Instead, it allows its intricate layers to build up to whatever it is they eventually come to stoke inside of you.

This nurturing record is no less impactful than her last, and it certainly provides as much food for thought while impressing itself deeply.

Hval's knack for the conceptual can make her an elusive songwriter, but The Long Sleep offers plenty of immediate charms. Like the disco ball that hangs through the EP's first half, Hval breaks down her ideas and refracts them into something luminous.

Unclear messages and unspooled melodies break new ground for Hval, and she inhabits it with grace on The Long Sleep. It’s as penetrating a work as Blood Bitch and its predecessor, Apocalypse, girl, but more humble in concept and more suspicious of its own claims.

Any music that Jenny Hval has produced addressed the listener on a personal level. There always seems to be an inherent honesty about her music and the concept behind her works, and that continues to be the case with The Long Sleep.

Even if The Long Sleep is (deep down or hiding in plain sight) a resigned, muted, end-of-the-line Kool-Aid party, the bug juice is delectable enough to call one back from the great unknown for seconds and so on.