Frida Hyvönen

Silence Is Wild

(Secretly Canadian)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Frida Hyvönen goes her own way, provoking one of the more awesomely unusual RIYL passages in a press release this year (which invokes Carole King, Jerry Lee Lewis, Plush and labelmates Antony and the Johnsons).  Silence Is Wild is her second release Stateside and finds the piano-based singer-songwriter adding a lot of embellishment to her songs while retaining the sometimes jolting intimacy on her lyric sheets.

She gets off to a fabulous start.  “Dirty Dancing” starts with a familiar sound – a yearning vocal, a tale of love in the rearview mirror, told over a sparse piano backbeat.  The narrative is one of the most evocative love songs of the year.  “The love of my life when I was a kid came by my house this morning,” she begins, going on to explain a youth spent in each other’s arms, pretending to be Baby and Johnny from Dirty Dancing.  Now he’s a chimney sweep – hey, Springsteen gets away with that kind of detail, why can’t Hyvönen? – and she’s, well, she’s a singer-songwriter.  Years have passed but the electricity begins:  “When I touched his sweeper’s arm with my piano finger, he said: Watch, Friday your hands will get dirty… and I felt like I had a fever.”  To further the nostalgia, she breaks into a wistful “oh oh oh, ooh ooh ooh” chorus that channels the Spector/Ronettes  vibe of “Be My Baby.”  It just goes to show that a song about Dirty Dancing can have a lot more emotional resonance than Dirty Dancing.  Of course, fans of happy endings should stick with the movie.

The momentum sustains through “Enemy Within,” but even when Hyvönen has a misstep – and “Highway 2 U” is the first track that’s a little shaky – there’s still plenty to find that’s praiseworthy.  Silence Is Wild is an album of uncompromised, undiluted artistic vision.  “Highway 2 U” (not sure what’s with the Prince/2Pac song title) doesn’t quite overcome its deep melodrama, but that’s a line Hyvönen is clearly comfortable straddling, and most of the time she winds up on the right side (“Dirty Dancing” obviously wasn’t without its risk of seeming trite or precious or melodramatic, but instead plays as emotional and earnest).

The plaintive “December” would normally qualify as the most disarmingly matter-of-fact song about abortion in a given year, but that honor in 2008 almost certainly goes to Amanda Palmer’s jaunty “Oasis.”  Hyvönen has her own uptempo surprise in “Scandinavian Blonde,” an ABBA-descended bit of pop delirium in which she pokes fun at a stereotype she presumably knows all too well.  Again utilizing an evolved sense of arrangement, she details her love-hate relationship with London in the contagious (and aptly titled) “London!” 

After flights of fancy and stark confessions, Hyvönen arrives at a surprise place on album closer “Why Do You Love Me So Much” – a stoic piano ballad that finds our protagonist confronting the prospect of having her very own happy ending, just like Baby and Johnny, just like in the movies.