A good perfumer will have you know that there is nothing simple about a rose. It is a powerful and incredibly mutable scent, one that can be layered endlessly and constituted from many component parts. Its aroma deepens and abstracts from moment to moment, inspiring vastly different impressions than just the raw stuff of its flower. Without even factoring in its enormous symbolic value, a rose is more ambiguous and open-ended than most florals, as likely to trigger sudden emotions as it is to stoke flame wars on Fragrantica or Jeremy Fragrance-style outbursts.
The rose Jenny Hval conjures on “To Be a Rose” is bright, atmospheric, and rich with personal meaning. The lead single off the Norwegian experimentalist’s forthcoming album, Iris Silver Mist, traces the contours of a vivid sense memory, leaping from past to present as she’s transported by an overpowering whiff of fragrance. Over lush, jungle ambience, Hval sets the scene before pulling out the rug: The stage she’s performing on is “obviously, literally falling apart” as the cigarette smoke from her audience comingles in her mind with the image of her mother inhaling on the balcony of her childhood home. Belting over muted horns and subtle guitar strums, Hval subtly inverts Gertrude Stein’s famous maxim: “A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette.” Nothing on “To Be a Rose” is simply what it is; the unreality of hundreds of mouths lighting up “in synchrony” only heightens the lovely, tender sketch of her mother as the trail of vapor eddies “over our dead-end town, smoke moving delicately/Dreaming up in the air, twirling like our real body.” As the track climaxes with a massive, gorgeous key change, Hval pays back her mother’s inspiration by distilling the memory into an intoxicating essence.
