FEATURE:
Björk at Sixty
IN THIS PHOTO: Björk in an outtake from the photoshoot for the cover of her 1995 sophomore album, Post/PHOTO CREDIT: Stephane Sednaoui
Inside Five Incredible Albums from the Icon
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AS the amazing Björk…
PHOTO CREDIT: Jesse Kanda
turns sixty on 21st November, I am writing a couple of features celebrating her work. I want to use this opportunity highlight my five favourite albums from her. There is a lot of competition, as the Icelandic artist has released ten studio albums. They are all wonderful! However, there are five that stick in the mind. I am going to dive deeper into them. I know there will be celebration and features written about Björk ahead of her birthday, as she is one of the most inventive and original artists we have ever seen. Let’s hope that Björk follows 2022’s Fossora, as we definitely need more of her magic. Whether you are a fan of not, you cannot deny that Björk is like nobody else. Below are five of her phenomenal albums that mean…
A lot to me.
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Debut
Release Date: 5th July, 1993
Labels: One Little Independent Records/Elektra
Producers: Nellee Hooper/Björk
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/product/bjrk/debut-1#50410545545547
Standout Tracks: Venus as a Boy/Big Time Sensuality/Violently Happy
Key Cut: Human Behaviour
Review:
“LET'S ADMIT it, the Sugarcubes resided in a border town south of Obscure and just north of Wacky. They juddered and lurched like difficult children, throwing toys against walls, scratching non-existent itches. They were the Euro B-52's. But there was, above everything, that voice, an alien screech that coughed up puffin feathers, cracked, screeched and soared like nothing you'd heard before.
Five years on and 'Birthday' still sounds ridiculously stark and extraordinary because of it. But, then, as you found yourself consumed by its strange beauty, in walked Einar The Irritant barking a bizarre psycho-babble rap, bringing even the most goo-goo eyed back down to earth with an ugly bump.
Is should, therefore, come as some relief to find Bjork left to journey alone without the ideas of a group cluttering up the landscape. The surprise, though, is that she has fashioned an album as elaborate, unique and fresh as 'Debut'. It's hard not to bellyflop straight into the deep end, cry, "Album of the year, end of story", and float off on a sea of hyperbole. 'Debut' takes you to strange, uncharted places. No group could make an album like this - too many ears to please. But, although this is very much Bjork's album (you get the impression that these are songs she's carried in her mind, like secrets, for years), the contribution of producer Nellee Hooper is vital. The man behind Soul II Soul's symphonies, he has managed to throw manifold ideas into this exotic soup without making it sound cluttered and overdone.
With his involvement and Bjork's previous solo dalliance with 808 State it would be easy to assume she's become a fully fledged house diva. Not so; 'Debut' may walk the same side of the street but it wanders into jazz, film soundtracks, pop too. Heck, there's even a couple of songs Babs Streisand wouldn't blink at covering. And then there's the just plain weird (natch).
The first three tracks are built from hypnotic loops. On 'Human Behaviour' a swampy kettle drum jazz vibe circles around Bjork's rasping larynx, trying to find a melody but eventually settling for the search. 'Crying' swims on a niggling piano riff, while the wonderful 'Venus As A Boy' creates an Arabic mantra. Here, as on most of the album, the tonsil gymnastics are kept to a minimum, but it's still a vastly disarming sound: a voice only a lifetime of Marlboro abuse or a guttural foreign language where people have names like Gudmundsdottir could create.
There's a bonkers part in 'There's More To Life Than This', though, where she sounds positively possessed. Allegedly recorded live in the Milk Bar toilets, a muffled house beat chunders away somewhere in the distance amid giggling chatter, then a door is closed and Bjork is left to sing alone about nicking boats and sneaking off into the night. This woman is quite patently barmy.
But even this is ill preparation for 'Like Someone In Love'. Accompanied only by 80-year-old harpist Corki Hale, it's the kind of tearful ballad you'd expect to find in the sad interlude of some crackly old black and white Judy Garland film. More fun, madness and surprise follows - the pulsating grind of 'Big Time Sensuality' and 'Violently Happy' plus the sweet unearthly breeze of 'One Day' which ripples along to baby gurgles and ambient fizzes.
This is an album that believes music can be magical and special. It will either puzzle you or pull you into its spell. And if you fall into the latter category, 'Debut' will make every other record you own seem flat, lifeless and dull by comparison. 9/10” – NME
Post
Release Date: 13th June, 1995
Labels: One Little Independent Records/Elektra/Mother/Polydor
Producers: Björk/Nellee Hooper/Graham Massey/Tricky/Howie B
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/product/bjrk/post-1#50483973914955
Standout Tracks: It’s Oh So Quiet/Isobel/Maybe
Key Cut: Army of Me
Review:
“This uncanny passion for sound is felt everywhere on Post. It’s in the scorched industrial march of “Enjoy,” in the grandeur of the strings on “You’ve Been Flirting Again.” It’s in the crackling trip-hop melancholy of “Possibly Maybe,” in the cool free jazz that rustles beneath “The Modern Things,” in the gleaming harpsichord of “Cover Me” (the vocals of which were recorded in a cave full of bats). And it’s especially present in the deliriously fun big-band blast of “It’s Oh So Quiet”—Björk’s madcap cover of the wartime tune from Hollywood star Betty Hutton, which she recorded with a 20-piece orchestra, manifesting her deep-rooted love for musicals. In a 1995 “AOL Chat” interview, a fan asked Björk where the idea for “It’s Oh So Quiet” came from, and she said that her live music director Guy Sigsworth “found it in a truck stop”—on a cassette comp—“and it became the tour anthem of last tour. Turned us on before the gigs.” It’s a cover that only a true pop maniac would go through with and only a pop maestro could pull off. The song explodes from Björk’s pin-drop whispers to throat-shredding wails—alongside blaring brass, the sheer loudness of Björk’s singing is a visceral delight. “Oh, what’s the use of falling in love?” Björk sings on the comedown, before raving up with an answer again.
Of course, Björk’s music is a testament to what is possible when logic and practical sense are not guiding principles. But she hardly withdrew. Björk said she had a total of three days off in 1993 and 1994 combined—she had become a legitimate star. In the face of the chaos of fame, “Army of Me” summons resilience, as if Björk knew exactly what she would be up against in the years to come. (In 1996, a fan tried to mail a bomb to her house.) She said “Army of Me” was written as an ultimatum to her own brother, to regain control of his life, lest he “meet an army of me.” Björk scratches at the depths of her voice, and the industrial backbone of the song, the crashes and shrapnel, fortify the task. “Army of Me” is proof that being the most obvious misfit in the room often requires being the toughest, too.
The double-time techno of “Hyperballad” begins with a glint. But it hones its strength. It’s a work of surrealism, narrating the tale of a woman who wakes up early at the top of a mountain, and throws “car parts, bottles, and cutlery” off its edge. She wonders what it would be like to throw herself off, too, her body slamming against the rocks, her eyes open all along—as a kind of catharsis, an emotional purging, in order to deal with people later: “I go through all this/Before you wake up/So I can feel happier/To be safe up here with you.” Her melody rises and tumbles, a slow spiral; the suspended rapture of the beat catches her in air.
If Debut’s “Human Behavior” was an ultimate outcast anthem—“If you ever get close to a human and human behavior, be ready, be ready to get confused”—then “Hyperballad” feels like a triumphant appeal to exist cooperatively alongside other people. Björk did this not only in her hyper-collaborative albums but in her entire project of making pop music, trying to reach all kinds of people at once. “Everything’s geared toward self-sufficiency. Fuck that,” Björk told punk historian Jon Savage in Interview. “For me, the target is to learn how to communicate with other people, which is the hardest thing, after all. What you should be doing is learning how to live with other human beings.” Car parts, bottles, cutlery, technology, and political superpowers are no match against this outreaching feeling, this ethos of interconnectedness that lives inside “Hyperballad,” inside of Björk in general, and it is an instinct inherent, ever crucially, in the survival of humanity.
“All the modern things/Like cars and such/Have always existed,” Björk sings on “The Modern Things.” “They’ve just been waiting in a mountain/For the right moment.” Not unlike the 23-year-old who dissected a television with love and awe, there’s a fantastic tinge of hope to this idea and to the whole of Post, an invitation into her profound exploration of places not yet traveled, to acknowledge the magic in the fact that there are sounds you might love that you can’t currently fathom. Twenty-five years later, you don’t need to scroll far through Björk’s Instagram feed to find the most audacious young popular artists alive, the likes of Arca and Rosalía, heeding that call, crowning her “queen.”
With Post, Björk set the bionic foundation for one of the most consequential careers in pop history. Here is where Björk became a perennial gateway drug, not to one sound but to the unknown, which is to say the future. She would soon leave London for the south of Spain and then New York, recording her two towering masterpieces—1997’s Homogenic, which Missy Elliott once gleefully likened to “Mozart at a rap show,” and the introverted microbeats of 2001’s Vespertine—crystallizing the totality of her vision. What other artist could successively collaborate with Wu-Tang Clan, interview Estonian minimalist legend Arvo Pärt, and appear on “MTV Unplugged” accompanied by a man playing a table of drinking glasses? In another era, maybe Bowie, which is just right—it was Bowie, after all, who inspired Björk’s immortal swan dress. By the end of the ’90s, the world would know the only answer: Björk” – Pitchfork
Vespertine
Release Date: 27th August, 2001
Labels: One Little Independent Records/Elektra
Producers: Björk/Nellee Hooper/Graham Massey/Tricky/Howie B
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/product/bjrk/vespertine-1#50410543481163
Standout Tracks: Undo/Frosti/Sun in My Mouth
Key Cut: Cocoon
Review:
“After cathartic statements like Homogenic, the role of Selma in Dancer in the Dark, and the film's somber companion piece, Selmasongs, it's not surprising that Björk's first album in four years is less emotionally wrenching. But Vespertine isn't so much a departure from her previous work as a culmination of the musical distance she's traveled; within songs like the subtly sensual "Hidden Place" and "Undo" are traces of Debut and Post's gentle loveliness, as well as Homogenic and Selmasongs' reflective, searching moments. Described by Björk as "about being on your own in your house with your laptop and whispering for a year and just writing a very peaceful song that tiptoes," Vespertine's vocals seldom rise above a whisper, the rhythms mimic heartbeats and breathing, and a pristine, music-box delicacy unites the album into a deceptively fragile, hypnotic whole. Even relatively immediate, accessible songs such as "It's Not Up to You," "Pagan Poetry," and "Unison" share a spacious serenity with the album's quietest moments. Indeed, the most intimate songs are among the most varied, from the seductively alien "Cocoon" to the dark, obsessive "An Echo, A Stain" to the fairy tale-like instrumental "Frosti." The beauty of Vespertine's subtlety may be lost on Björk fans demanding another leap like the one she made between Post and Homogenic, but like the rest of the album, its innovations are intimate and intricate. Collaborators like Matmos -- who, along with their own A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, appear on two of 2001's best works -- contribute appropriately restrained beats crafted from shuffled cards, cracking ice, and the snap-crackle-pop of Rice Krispies; harpist Zeena Parkins' melodic and rhythmic playing adds to the postmodernly angelic air. An album singing the praises of peace and quiet, Vespertine isn't merely lovely; it proves that in Björk's hands, intimacy can be just as compelling as louder emotions” – AllMusic
Biophilia
Release Date: 5th October, 2011
Label: One Little Independent Records
Producers: Björk/16bit
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/product/bjrk/biophilia#50408804778315
Standout Tracks: Crystalline/Cosmogony/Hollow
Key Cut: Mutual Core
Review:
“9/10. The 18th-century poet and artist William Blake once wrote, “Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death.” Blake was a controversial figure who rejected organised religion, but in his art and writing he yearned to find a sense of wonder in the world that science was increasingly defining and exploiting for profit around him.
Even as she proves his statement too simplistic for the 21st century, echoes of Blake’s sentiment can be found in Björk’s multidisciplinary approach to ‘Biophilia’. Existing as iPad apps and a traditional record, it represents her refusal to accept barriers between scientific rationalism and the marvel of the natural world, between different creative disciplines – the expressiveness of music versus the strict language of coding. By turning hours of research on DNA (‘Hollow’), lunar cycles (‘Moon’) and gravity (‘Solstice’) into sublime music, and having the grace to allow this to be shaped by the leading lights in application design, Björk has created one of the boldest artistic statements of our time.
Yet after the excited reception granted to the tech side of ‘Biophilia’, could releasing its music as a mere album seem rather arcane? Well, no. Science and education are at their most easily digestible when given with a sweetener. As you hear the choir, the complex Tesla synth, pendulum harps, gameleste, harpsichord and of course Björk’s voice and words, she creates a gift for your imagination, a tool more powerful than any iPad.
So while it might be a celebration of everything from the inconceivable vastness of cosmology to the microscopic formation of crystals and the way a virus spreads, musically the joy here is in simplicity. These songs were all written upstairs in a small room in Björk’s house in Reykjavik before being developed in a beach hut in Puerto Rico. Within them, Björk seems not like some crazed scientist, shrieking amid the erupting test tubes in her lair, but a fragile, very human narrator entirely devoted to telling her story. On ‘Mutual Core’, her voice cracks against the increasing, insistent power of the electronic rhythms, as if recognising our human insignificance in the face of geology: “As fast as your fingernail grows/The Atlantic ridge drifts”. On ‘Thunderbolt’ the tense buzz of the Tesla synth is bracing, yet Björk, with choir around her, sings, “Craving miracles, craving miracles”. ‘Moon’, by contrast, sounds innocent, the gentle harp plucks akin to a child’s mobile spinning slowly. On ‘Sacrifice’ you can hear the fizz of electricity in the drum’n’bass-inflected rhythm.
But it’s ‘Cosmonogy’ that’s the bright star around which the other songs revolve. Björk’s voice glows and fades like distant bursts of light; rich horns, cymbals and choirs sit above a deep, hollow sub bass. Of the moment that’s flabbergasted scientists for centuries, Björk puts it simply: “Then there was a certain bang”, and in an instant the moment of creation becomes more than just a physics freakout. The refrain “Make me wonder”, voiced beautifully by the choir, feels like an insistence that for all science might explain, we never lose our childlike sense of marvel.
In interviews, Björk often says “to cut a long story short”, either before or after launching into a digression that can take in Icelandic politics, geothermal energy, musicology and pissed karaoke before ending up miles from where she began. In a way, ‘Biophilia’ is like this, a wonderful distillation of ideas, playful and serious, intimate yet the most fantastic journey. It is that rarest of things, a record so particular to Björk’s own artistry that no-one could ever hope to replicate it. In these wide-eyed hymns for a secular, scientific age, Björk Guðmundsdóttir has got the whole world in her lungs” – NME
Utopia
Release Date: 24th November, 2017
Label: One Little Independent
Producers: Björk/Arca/Rabit
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/product/bjrk/utopia-1#50483971686731
Standout Tracks: The Gate/Utopia/Tabula Rasa
Key Cut: Blissing Me
Review:
“To talk of Björk’s Utopia as a rebirth is no stretch. On the cover of her ninth solo album she emerges as though from an iridescent caul. Her forehead has been modified into a uterine shape; pearls fall from fallopian flowers.
It wouldn’t be a stretch either to note that after the austere, extreme Vulnicura – the 2015 album that marked the pain and fury of Björk’s separation from the father of her daughter – Utopia harkens back to the nature love of older albums such as Biophilia and Vespertine, and the default lust for life Björk has exhibited throughout her long career.
The sounds here are airy and lush, suggesting naturescapes and freedom. (On the bloopy, wonderful Claimstaker, Björk actually sings: “The forest is in me”.) Birdsong from as far afield as Venezuela and Iceland, and its human analogue, flute music, define the sonics. On the cover, Björk not only holds a flute, she has two holes drilled into her throat and, startlingly, next to them sits a dead, or underdeveloped, chick.
Themes emerge gradually. The Gate describes obliquely, in music and words, Björk’s passage from the darkness of the Vulnicura emotions back into the light of love. Blissing Me hints at a new affair – texting each other too much, the electricity of touch. The song Courtship, perhaps the most overtly “pop” song here, makes plain Björk’s recent claim that Utopia is her “Tinder album”: “He turned me down,” she winks. “I then downturned another.”
There is another, more overarching concept: Björk’s aural vision of utopia is a faraway isle peopled by women and children, a sensual and sensible place unlike our own troubled world. Again, jungle birds and flutes feature, the flutes played by an all-female Icelandic ensemble assembled by Björk for the purpose.
There are traces of the bad old world. Sue Me riffs hard on male wrongdoing. “He took it from his father who took it from his fatherrrr,” she sings. “Let’s break this curse, so it won’t fall on our daughterrrr and her daughterrrs.” You can’t ever quite separate the work of Björk from the work of her collaborator, Arca, the Venezuelan-born, London-based Alejandro Ghersi, who also worked on Vulnicura, but his dark digital hand is slightly more evident here, in the unanchored beats and sinister, pitch-shifted vocal presence.
The electrifying Tabula Rasa is even more specific, speaking of Björk’s “deepest wish”. “We are swollen from hiding his affairs,” Björk mourns as flutes sigh. She wants to wipe the slate clean. “Tabula rasa for my children/ Not repeating the fuck-ups of the fathers/ For us women to rise and not just take it lying down.” Later, the discussion widens out, away from the personal. “Embarrassed to pass this mess on to you,” Björk aches. Eventually, rain falls.
Traditionalists might still wonder where all the nice steady beats have gone, why so little music here is anchored. The dominant message, though, is of limitlessness, of hope and, on Future Forever, of “a matriarchal dome” with “musical scaffolding” – The Observer