Blood From A Stone

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Is Blood from a Stone Hanne Hukkelberg's difficult third album? Actually, on the surface it may be her most direct work so far, slotting more neatly and readily into a recognizable genre type -- call it dark, shoegazey, post-punk-derived art rock -- than either of her previous albums, and making prominent and comparatively conventional use of electric guitars, without abandoning her distinctive found-object approach to orchestration. Hukkelberg's music has always been difficult, requiring repeated and attentive listening for the nuances of its elliptical melodies and intimate sound-worlds to seep through. She's always been an artist who works in shades of gray. But if Little Things was silvery: blithe, wispy, evanescent; Rykestraße 68 more of a wizened, smoky charcoal, mottled and murky; Blood is closer to a gunmetal smear: drab, dense, and frequently oppressive. Drawing explicit inspiration here from the likes of Sonic Youth, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and PJ Harvey, Hukkelberg seems less interested in those artists' visceral urgency than their sonic grittiness. Blood gestures toward post-punk's primal edginess, particularly in its brutalist percussion tactics (freezers and stoves, clogs and rocks, no traditional drum kits), but it fails to approach the traction and immediacy of, for instance, the previous album's gripping, revelatory Pixies cover. Part of the trouble is that her remarkable voice is put to notably less expressive use this time around. More to the point, though: most of the songs just aren't that compelling. Things start out strong, with the lush, gauzy "Midnight Sun Dream," the swaggering title track, and the driving "Bandy Riddles," which boasts the album's most sprightly melody. From there on it's heavy going, as the songs seem to devolve into a dreary, largely undistinguished mass, respectable and even potent on a tonal and textural level, with some undeniable moments of beauty and strangeness, but weirdly laborious to actually listen to. No one should have expected getting Blood from a Stone to be easy, but it's a shame it had to be this much of a chore.

© K. Ross Hoffman /TiVo