Norwegian singer songwriter Hanne Hukkelberg has one of those incredible voices that you can lose not only yourself, but everything else in. Her voice becomes your world the moment she opens her mouth. It’s so distinctive, so tender that you’re immediately hanging on every nuance. It’s a voice that possesses immense power yet is able able to become whisper thin and delicate when required. Her delivery is so intimate, so close mic’d that you feel she’ singing only to you – you can actually hear her lips pursing she intones. Her music follows her vocals, delicate minimal wisps of fractured jazz and winsome pop that come and go like nervous gasps of breath. Without the melodic structure of her vocals the music would be frustratingly incomplete, obscure and aimless as elements such as bicycle wheels, egg slicers or fishing reel guitars come and go, if only for the briefest moments. Together with her incredible voice the arrangements astound. It’s this incredible genreless pastiche of elements that somehow manages to be incredibly experimental yet still lush, pop and accessible. There are elements of electronica, double bass, woodwind, strings, field recordings and all manner of strange instruments. It’s actually slightly reminiscent of the Tom Waits approach, incredible, idiosyncratic experimental music, that sounds remarkably cohesive because it’s united beneath these vocals. Yet where Waits tends to be going for the bombast, for the junkyard jig, Hukkelberg searches for and finds a more delicate refined world, post torch song into some kind of electronic folk lullaby. Whilst most of the pieces here on her second album are incredibly emotive and evocative, her cover of the Pixies’ ‘Break My Body’, in particular, is nothing short of remarkable.
Bob Baker Fish
