Björk
Björk’s got a lot going for her: eccentric songwriting, visual presence, a smartly chosen bunch of collaborators, high-flying conceptual grandeur. More than anything, though, she’s got a voice like nothing else on the planet. It’s bizarre and lovely, a sound that seems at home both on radio hits and in avant-garde art spaces. It communicates at least as much as her songs themselves, and in fact presenting lyrics is pretty far from the point: unless you pay close attention, she might as well be singing the phone book in Icelandic. (She’s not, is she?) – Douglas Wolk
STUDIO ALBUMS
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Equal parts acerbic punk poet (her first band was called Spit & Snot) and butter-wouldn't-melt tune fairy, Reykjavik-born Björk lit up the gloomy post-grunge landscape with Debut (1993), her sparkling solo, erm, debut (in the U.K. at least). Freed from the art-rock pretensions of former band the Sugarcubes and boasting a smorgasbord of musical styles ranging from carefree freeze-funk ("Come to Me") to blissed-out trance pop ("One Day"), Top Thirty hits "Venus as a Boy" and "Big Time Sensuality" combined an acrobatic vocal style with air-tight arrangements courtesy of producer Nellee Hooper (the Soul II Soul member who did a celebrated remix of Massive Attack's landmark 1991 hit "Unfinished Sympathy"). If an interpretation of jazz standard "Like Someone in Love" accompanied by a harp may have overstated her Patti Smith via Amelie appeal, Debut retains its otherworldy allure, encapsulated in opening confessional "Human Behaviour." "There's no map/ And a compass won't help at all," she gasps, signposting the mountain path to weirdness since followed by everyone from Karen O to Bat for Lashes.
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Having established herself on the pop stage with Debut, follow-up Post (1995) saw Björk's ambitions go widescreen.With everyone from Tricky to Howie B to 808 State's Graham Massey fighting over the producer's chair and a musical palette ranging from ambient dub ("Possibly Me") to strident techno-pop ("Army of Me") Post boasts a musical vision to match Cecil B. DeMille.
more »And then there's the lyrics. Bizarre, brazen and remorselessly tongue-in cheek, songs like "Enjoy" and "You've Been Flirting Again" are dark, delirious examinations of the mating game whilst "Hyperballad" is euphoric — "We live on a mountain/ Right at the top/ There's a beautiful view" — but only to disguise a damning rejection of consumerism. It was smash hit "It's Oh So Quiet" which kept the accountants happy, however. A reworking of Betty Hutton's Hollywood showtune "Blow a Fuse" delivered with a kindergarten cutesiness, confirming her role as indie-rock's reigning queen of weird. From this point on, Björk was in the big league.
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Inspired both sonically and emotionally by the break-up of Björk's relationship with jungle star Goldie, Homogenic brilliantly juxtaposes strings and breakbeats to explore the dangerous heights and glacial depressions of that emotional landscape where love is at its most rarefied and intense. But while mid-'90s dance influences have dated its predecessor Telegram, the fractured loops here transcend any dance imperative, cracking through grand orchestral arrangements like fissures through pack ice. It's a serious and moody album, both angry and optimistic. The opening "Hunter" frames it as a search, where frustration with emotional cowardice ("Five Years," "Batchelorette") finds its match in a hope ("Alarm Call," "All Is Full of Love") that is anything but sentimental. Recorded in Spain with collaborators such as Mark Bell of LFO, veteran UK pop-electronica knob-twiddler Mark "Spike" Stent, Howie B. and the Icelandic String Octet, Homogenic marks the end of Björk's flirtation with dance and heralds her return to Iceland — the defiant early peak of an artist audibly finding both emotional and artistic maturity.
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Vespertine is Björk's most serene and sensuous record. An album primarily about domestic and sexual bliss, it features some of the most intoxicatingly beautiful songs she has written: "Cocoon," "Aurora," "Heirloom." "Pagan Poetry" may be the single greatest track she has ever recorded.
more »The Björkian soundfield is much as it always is: skittering rhythms, warm keyboard tones, discreet "laptronic" pulses, plinking harps and swooshing strings, a general meshing of organic and synthetic textures. But her unique sonic palette is harnessed here in the service of hushed awe: womblike intimacy and occasional ecstasy.
Her extraordinary voice never sounded better. The urgent passion of "Pagan Poetry" is thrilling. The tremulous breathiness of her vocal on "Cocoon" — a song of sexual adoration for her artist husband Matthew Barney — is so vulnerably naked it's almost shocking: "He slides inside, half-awake, half asleep..."
After 1997's somber, elemental Homogenic, Vespertine is whispered, glimmeringly pretty. Certain tracks — "Undo," "It's Not Up to You," "An Echo, A Stain," "Sun in My Mouth," the closing "Unison" — are more drifting and hypnotic, less melodically arresting than others. But the floating mood of semi-somnambulism, of almost narcotic dreaminess, is maintained throughout. As she sings on "Undo," "it's not meant to be a struggle up here..."
Keyboards such as celeste and glockenspiel suggest the childlike feel of music boxes, complementing the often innocent wonder of Björk's voice. The gorgeous instrumental "Frosti" suggests the influence of Indonesian gamelan. In contrast, "Heirloom" and the opening "Hidden Place" up the tempo just enough to keep us on our toes.
No one has ever sounded remotely like this brave avant-garde sprite, this alternative diva. An acquired taste for many, she remains surely one of postmodern pop's few true geniuses. And the exquisite Vespertine will long be counted among her finest work.
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Björk is at her best when building consistent, compelling sound-worlds for her ideas to inhabit, a feat she achieves by collaborating with equally idiosyncratic musicians. Medulla — an almost solely vocal work featuring veteran art-folk troubadour Robert Wyatt, vocal Houdini Mike Patton (ex-Faith No More), famed beatboxer Rahzel (the Roots), the electronic duo Matmos and Dokaka, and Icelandic, Inuit and British choirs — is no exception.
more »Medulla taps into the dark, sticky, vulnerable marrow of the spirit, vocalizing its deepest recesses and summoning a more primal mythos than its fairytale predecessor, Vespertine, by exploring the starting point of all human music — the voice. Yet, for all its comparative starkness, it's every bit as sensual as the previous album.
The electronic treatments range from industrial distortion to percussive glitches and dreamy layering, rarely descending into novelty. Instead, processed vocals combine with Rahzel's beatboxing and the naturally percussive elements of language to form an organic central framework for Björk's lead. She is careful not to shroud the songs in too much digital trickery: Icelandic-language tracks "Vökuró" and "Öll Birtan" have the simplicity of folk tunes, forming rough-edged natural sine waves of mesmerising beauty as they unfold.
For many, Medulla's immediate centerpiece will be "Who Is It," as gorgeous a pop song as Björk has ever written, or the sweet sea-fever of "Oceania" (written for the 2004 Summer Olympics) and these tracks are as necessary to Medulla as its eerie atmosphere and bursts of atonality. They reiterate what might be Björk's foremost achievement: it's not only her talent for exploration that so charms her listeners, it's also her absolute generosity as a songwriter in taking them with her, however alien the sonic route.
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What with the run-ins with deranged stalkers, on-set altercations with director Lars Von Trier during the filming of 2000's Dancer in the Dark, and a harrowing trip to post-tsunami Indonesia last year in her role as UN ambassador, no one can say Björk has shirked her responsibilities over the last decade as the Queen of Oddball Pop.
more »The solution? Enter the studio with an A-Z of avant-garde musicians from around the world and purge her demons through the medium of coruscating dance-pop. Opener "Earth Intruders" is a pounding three-way rhythmic blitzkrieg between producer Timbaland, Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale and hip percussionist Chris Corsano, over which she yells "Turmoil! Carnage!" On "Declare Independence" Congolese collective Konono No. 1 apply scrap-metal-sourced electronics which build into an extraordinary brutalist electro-barrage over which shrieks: "Start your own galaxy/ Attack the language/ Make your own flag!" A dreamy "Hope" meanwhile, wrong-foots you at every turn, alluding to "suicide bombers" over a jangle of Clavichord and free-falling beats.
After the storm, the calm: "My Juvenile" is a heart-breaking duet with Antony Hegarty, set to ancient Chinese acoustics, whilst "Dull Flame of Desire" finds the pair reunited over mournful colliery brass, entwined like lovers ("I love your eyes my dear") whilst the world goes to wrack and ruin around them.
If the ambient thrust of Vespertine was Bjork's attempt at soundtrack heaven, Volta sees her crash-landed back on earth and squaring up to the horror and wonder of life in the 21st century.
It's brave and it's beautiful. You need to hear it.
