Christine Owman
(Revolving)
"Spelling Words," the first song on this third full-length from the Swedish singer/songwriter, begins in a tipsy saw of cello, a regular plink and plunk of banjo, the soft-focus drift of folky female vocals. Traditional sounds turn slightly askew, sheer sonic pleasure turns into something slightly darker and more eccentric, as Owman questions the very nature of human connection, the fallibility of human communication, Swedish singer/songwriter Christine Owman. It's an odd song, seductively soft on the surface but full of sharp, jutting angles, familiar-sounding but, once examined, contrarian and vaguely unsettling. It's an excellent introduction for Throwing Knives, too, showcasing the wiry, unconventional intelligence of an unusual artist.
Throwing Knives spends a good bit of its ten tracks on relationships in various stages of disintegration, yet to call it a break-up album is a gross oversimplication. Singing in a soft, blurry voice that verges from folk to pop to electro, she resembles, in her quietude, the Twin Peaks muse Julee Cruise. Still listen to the empowerment in her lyrics, or the potent way she combines electronic and organic elements, and other comparisons emerge - Kristin Hersh, Juliana Hatfield, even Beth Gibbons. Owman sings from a position of strength, a sense that she will be okay regardless of romantic outcomes. She is never, even at her most melancholy and introspective, anyone's victim. "I won't take it just cos I love you," she sings on "The Conflict," and the line has a bit of a lift to it, a bit of the dance floor's pulse and heedlessness.
Owman has been playing the cello since early childhood and has since taught herself to handle a full complement of other instruments - banjo, musical saw, drums, bass, guitar and piano. Her oddest songs, lyrically, are often juxtaposed with down home arrangements. "Circles" is all drum-shuffling, banjo picking blues, Owman's voice trilling and fluttering around button-downed country rhythms; it also has an entire stanza about masturbation.
In the softer, more traditional songs, Owman brings in her modern viewpoint subtly, in the lyrics and in the way she works sweetness into confrontation and vice versa. Yet this is also a songwriter who is comfortable with technology, who performs general, in front of a screen showing movies she herself has created. So, it is not surprising that some of her strongest material is abrasive and current, churning industrial-strength dance beats under her delicate, billowy melodies. "Dance," Owman's most unadulterated statement of independence, undulates with sensuality, a buzz-saw rhythm under diaphanous lyrics, little gasps of breath punctuating the song's phrases. "She's a dancing baby, but she's not dancing for you," Owman murmurs. You get the picture of a very modern woman, intrigued by love but not consumed by it, self-sufficient, sexual, and not necessarily available.
Much of women's pop and rock seems to be primarily directed at men, packaging femininity in ways that confirm or overturn male-generated stereotypes. Throwing Knives comes at womanhood from the inside, painting a far more complicated, conflicted view that may or may not appeal to the opposite sex. That it's couched in beautiful, eerie melodies, sometimes delicate, sometimes ragged arrangements, and a dream-like vocal prettiness can only add to the conundrum. Christina Owman is certainly not going for the obvious.
DOWNLOAD: "Dance," "Circles" "Spelling Words" JENNIFER KELLY
