Jehnny Beth - To Love is to Live

by Zena Grieg

published: 9 / 8 / 2020

Label: Universal Music
Format: CD

Provocative and sensitive debut solo album from Mercury-nominated Savages vocalist Jehnny Beth

Review

After two Mercury-nominated albums with the post-punk band Savages, the French singer Camille Berthomier, known by her stage name Jehnny Beth, has released her own debut album ‘To Love is to Live’. Recorded over a year-long period, produced by Flood and Atticus Ross, the eleven- track collection is a nuanced combination of industrial rock, late-night jazz and gentle acoustic balladry. Appearing in tandem with her new volume of erotic short stories ‘Crimes Against Love Manifesto’, this is a stream of consciousness journey with uncompromising lyrics through innocence, sexuality, gender and identity. In Beth’s words, the record is “an endless loop and the spiral is the best representation of life; our galaxy is a spiral as well.” Multi-layered songs cover different genres - the prologue opener ‘I Am’ with its dream-like lyrics against a backdrop of guitar and piano; the hard-hitting punk ‘I’m The Man’ with its relentless drums, razor-sharp guitars and in-your-face lyrics; the jazz inflections of ‘The Rooms’ with its understated cello, piano and saxophone; the melancholic strings and vocals of the love song ‘The French Countryside’, the wistfulness of ‘Heroine’ – “All I want is to be the woman you cannot see”; and finally the abstract and cinematic ‘Human’. An eclectic rollercoaster exploration of love, sin, sex and violence amidst the contemporary mire of politics and an absurd world, ‘To Love is to Live’ is an album driven by vulnerability and aggression in equal measure. A theatrical tour de force, at once provocative and sensitive, this is a debut record not to miss.

Track Listing:-

1 I Am
2 Innocence
3 Flower
4 We Will Sin Together
5 A Place Above [feat. Cillian Murphy]
6 I'm The Man
7 The Rooms
8 Heroine
9 How Could You [feat. Joe Talbot]
10 French Countryside
11 Human