Jenny Hval - Blood Bitch album review: a triumph of time-travelling vampires and menstruation

Concept albums aren't new, but Blood Bitch breaks fresh ground with its fictitious story about time-travelling vampires and menstruation – or, as Norwegian writer/musician/artist Jenny Hval notes, "an investigation of blood. Blood that is shed naturally. The purest and most powerful."

Sonically, Blood Bitch employs the most serene soundtracking: ambient music, soft-synth drone, spoken word, musique concrète, and an undertone of the gentlest black metal you'll ever hear.

With song titles such as Ritual Awakening, In the Red, The Great Undressing and Period Piece, you're left in no doubt as to the subject matter, but Hval's triumph is in cleverly transforming the (for some people) unsavoury aspects of such an intimate female bodily function into something acutely and collectively important.

[ jennyhval.com ]