JEHNNY BETH
Album: To Love Is To Live (Arts & Crafts)
Book: C.A.L.M.: Crimes Against Love Memories (White Rabbit)
KNOWN FOR HER potent performances in Savages, Jehnny Beth knew she could dig deeper. On her first solo album, To Love Is To Live, Beth exhausts eternal questions of the confines of desire, scratching and spitting like Kim Gordon, seething like PJ Harvey, but also elevating like Shara Nova of My Brightest Diamond. The album’s woozy visceral quality stems collectively from producers Atticus Ross (NIN), Flood, and longtime partner Johnny Hostile.
In conjunction with the album, Beth stretches her legs further onto the written page with C.A.L.M.: Crimes Against Love Memories, a book that pairs her literary erotica with Hostile’s photos, entwining the deliciously captivating with the plainly stark. C.A.L.M. blurs the lines of fantasy and reality in tones of classic gothic horror, à la Shirley Jackson. Opportunists, lost souls, and outcasts coexist here in their common thirst for connection.
By Erin Wolf
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2020 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!
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