Album Review: Jehnny Beth - 'To Love Is To Live'
On the night David Bowie died in 2016, Jehnny Beth decided it was finally time to make her own solo record. The result is To Love is to Live, an album stuffed with fervor and emotion.
“I realised it was one of those moments where you have to face up to mortality,” she told the Sun recently. “Life is short and maybe I need to be brave and not afraid of doing something that scares me.”
The album begins with “I Am.” A creepy, dystopian-like voice chants for a few bars, and fades into Beth’s own vocals -- a huge crescendo to set the stage.
“I am the ocean, I am the moon,” she sings, “I am dying far too soon.”
On several tracks, like “The Rooms,” Beth incorporates a mournful saxophone, invoking the same sounds Bowie used on his final album in 2016 just days before his death, Blackstar.
“The core of the record is the pain,” she continued to The Sun. She also noted the influence of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. “For me, it was a lack of sensibility, the lack of a connection with the rest of the human race. I’d moved to Paris and I felt disconnected and isolated.”
“‘Blackstar’ had a huge influence in terms of reminding me how an album can be a testament, an imprint of your vision of the world, and it will last longer than you will,” she told the New York Times a few months ago. She decided to work on the record “as if I was going to die.”
She packs remarkable amounts of material into short amounts of time, using her voice to shout like it's a protest, or playing with synth sounds so they mimic European ambulance wails.
“It’s the guilt of course, because I was raised Catholic, and they teach you it’s bad form to think man is a piece of shit,” she sings on “Innocence.” Beth was brought up in France.
“See the rivers of blood, the endless cruelties, the manipulations and the fears,” a man recites poetry at the beginning of “A Place Above” -- an ode to the abuse of power. It’s backed simply by a piano bit and a synth landscape.
Beth and her new album are a conglomerate of both a previous generation of avant garde artists like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, or Kim Gordon, but also of contemporary musicians like St.Vincent or Fiona Apple.
When the album comes to a close on “Human,” it just might be the answer to the first track “I Am.”
Words by Allison Rapp