Norway's Jenny Hval is a provocateur, a young artist-musician-writer who uses an arresting voice and an unusually keen intellect to make complex yet accessible art-pop on her recent Innocence Is Kinky (Rune Grammofon). The album is a densely woven skewering of pop's normal subject matter, given maximum heft by the quietly subversive Hval's pithy perspectives on mythology, mass media and sexual identity. There's both surrealist stream of consciousness and cunningly contrived exactitude in Hval and her work, heightened by her elfin matter-of-factness. A former member of Cleveland's premier drone kings, Emeralds, guitarist-producer Mark McGuire has just released Along the Way (Dead Oceans), an ambitious concept record delineating an inner journey to enlightenment via entrancing, melodic guitar and electronics.

Tue., April 8, 8 p.m., 2014
(Expired: 04/08/14)

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