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Vespertine Live

by

Björk

 
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Vespertine Live
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Avg: 4.0 (111 ratings)

A live disc that stands up to and sometimes surpasses its namesake album's original recordings.

  • We Say...

    In a downloading fray where box sets must justify existence beyond swanky packaging, Björk's Vespertine Live (one-fourth of the 2004-released Live box) stands up to and sometimes surpasses its namesake album's original recordings.

    The collection, culled from performances during 2001's Vespertine world tour, leaving off a few of that album's tracks and adding some from Homogenic and Selmasongs, documents the largely successful supersizing of the emotional and erotic pointillism she was exploring at the time. The combination of Il Novocento Orchestra's swoop and the amplified bug-buzz of Matmos' electronic wingflap beats and digital-distortion clicks turns the album's fecund paramecia into sliding tectonic plates. Composed silences that suggested intimate eye-blinks here gape like shifting faults, inspiring communal breath-holding. These effects add hubristic conspiratorial grandeur to "Hidden Place," and close-encounter galactic suspense to "Unison." The choirs fill the space as oppositional Greek choruses for dramatic declarations like "It's Not Up to You," and muscular agents of levity on "Aurora" and "All Is Full of Love."

    If the pops under "It's All in Our Hands" hint at the tenacity of machines, Björk herself sounds relaxed — happily AWOL from her erstwhile army-of-me, shedding the skin of the sensitive cyborg and performing human privacy for hushed crowds.

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