One of the pics above was taken by me and one wasn’t, and I mention this only because last night Piano was so packed out for the premiere East Coast performance of Swedish pop sensation Jenny Wilson, I couldn’t get close enough to take a decent picture.
Piano is tiny but somewhere in the middle of her gorgeous, deeply, almost physically moving “Bad Water”, nobody doubted they were in the presence of a pop star.
Wilson, dressed in a deep red cloak with a hood she kept up, made her way through the audience like the murderer in Nik Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” -an intense, almost scarily intense visage. Then she sat behind a piano and a back-up singer Sabine stood center stage and they began to weave strange soul deliverance.
Imagine Bjork plus Tori Amos plus Annie Lennox with a better voice than the former two and a wilder countenance than the latter and you get some idea of what the woman sounds like but not what she is up to.
Wilson is part of a Swedish music scene that has evolved since 2005 and whose bigger names here are the Knife and Robyn -highly sophisticated, highly emotion pop music. Robyn has released the album of the summer and Wilson, working to break the States, is still pushing her self-released sophomore effort Hardships! from 2009.
In an hour long set at Piano, Wilson remains true to her soul leanings. “Ain’t Gonna Go There” is r&b flavored with Sabine not singing back up but counterpoint. Wilson goes from a quietness ever more intensely upwards, she reminds me of PJ Harvey circa Is This Desire?, except Wilson, for all her outre otherness, sounds like a pop star. She sounds like a crossover waiting for someone to get the package right. It is AOR, but really Adult -it ain’t fucking around.
With no rhythm section at all, she keeps time by getting us to clap our hands, then pounds the black keys to get us there. She’ll stop a song completely and turn around to look at us before slowly, muffledly, building her way back up, at which point her moans become orgasmically, deep, feminine. “I couldn’t sing my songs without you but I am easily replaced” she sings.
Jenny takes to an acoustic guitar. And I am thinking this might be entirely improvised idea because earlier I had run into Spencer Scanlon, who was borrowing the instrument (Spencer: “it’s actually a really unique guitar, it’s a 1940’s Gibson that belongs to Christopher Paul Stelling. it’s a true work of art.”) before the set started.
Behind the guitar, Jenny is actually less intimidating, and she sings yet another song and it is more moving, deeper since the violence of the emotions are lost somewhere in the sorrow. Which leads me to the lyric content. It isn’t all love but it is all an intense sense of self, it isn’t all violence but it is all a violent dislike of having the self abused. “Open door, faded rainbow” she sings at one point, and it is an emotional highlight, the pairs voices dropping out and moving in together, weaving a spell of beauty and sadness with just a piano to carry them.
I have little doubt I’ve seen a potential US star. Wilson has charisma, has attitude, in the tiny confines of Piano, there is still room between herself and her audience. She isn’t a country one of us stars, there is something regal in her bearing.
The evening ends with her huge “Only Here For The Fight” and though the only song the audience sings along with, it is not even the best moment. Wilson and Sabine get every last bit of it, with an elongated acapella coda.
And then Wilson departs through the crowd, a vision both be- and ma- lign at the same time, waiting on a world waiting to hear her.