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Björk - Vespertine The first time I saw Björk was in the video for the
Sugarcubes song Birthday, and I was immediately captivated by this cute and
bizarre elfin creature with the unearthly squeaky-squawky voice. I managed to
record the video, and watched it over and over again. Soon enough, my father
came into the room, watched thirty seconds of it in judgmental silence, and
then announced, "What's this? Mongoloid pop?" While Björk's
features may (by a large stretch of the imagination) be Mongolian, I think my
father was referring to the way she seemed to involuntarily toss her head.
Plus the way she seemed to look at her environment as if it was being rebuilt
every second, just to delight her "simple" sense of perception. It
is undoubtedly this quality - that she is not, in fact, "entirely with
us" - that led to Lars von Trier casting Björk in his film Dancer in the
Dark. (And also to his exasperation at then having to work with her.) Fifteen years later, and Björk has just released her
fourth solo album, Vespertine (or fifth, if you include Selma's Songs).
Looking back at my review of her last effort, Homogenic, I noted that she had
not yet fulfilled her enormous potential, citing the track Jorga as a sublime
slice of music which needed to be "unravelled" over an entire album.
Well, with Vespertine she has done just that, and listening to it first time
through I realized I was in the presence of an earphonic Event. Quite simply,
this may be the best album of the decade . . . already. In a year of diverse
highpoints, managing to wed the avant-garde with the commercial (Missy Elliot
and Tool, for instance), Vespertine stands out as the most coherent,
consistent, and - yes - original album for a very long time. My one reservation rests with track 3, whose chorus sounds
slightly too tailored for radio singalongs. It's not that this is a bad song,
it's just that I wish it were a b-side or on Post, since it breaks the
otherwise seamless symphonic perfection of the other 50 minutes. (Mind you,
it's nothing a bit of cd-programming can't fix.) The lyrics can also come
across as goofy, naïve, or - to quote my ever-loving father again -
"retarded." But I take this to be a touching case of its
uncompromising vision, and complements the whole "idiot savant"
subtext which inevitably goes with the more patronising attempts to
categorize Björk's music. I would love to go through track by track and wax poetic
about all the various glittering brilliances of this album: the tiny crackles
provided by Matmos and others by way of Mouse on Mars, and all the tiny,
lovingly applied stitches and cross-stitches between and within the tracks. I
would probably use words like "glassy," "skittishly
focused," "icily voluptuous" and other journowaffle. (And I
would probably also point out that she seems to be getting laid a lot, and I
can only hope this continues, given the artistic results.) But I won't. Because many other people have done so
already, and it's really pointless to shepherd such intensities onto the
page. All I can really do is thank her for giving such a gift to the world,
and for "restoring my blisses." |
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