REVIEWS:
I have only a few things to say about everyone's favorite Icelandic midget ice queen, since thanks to her rather unconventional attire at the 2001 Academy Awards ceremony, pretty much everything the public wants to say about her already has been said. However, I have the following to say: 1) Her original band, the Sugarcubes, though I used to sort of like them, were really really annoying. Imagine the B-52's, only instead of an openly-gay carnival barker dominating the proceedings and blocking out the role of the gorgeous female vocalists, in his place is a really loud and very very Icelandic guy who seems to be in love with his own crappy voice. That's the Sugarcubes. 2) One thing I've noticed about Bjork - she almost never seems to write melodies, but that's because the lush, sweeping approach she takes to her music makes it so that she doesn't even have to. Now that's a deal. 3) As a vocalist, Bjork is unconventional and heavily-criticized, but one thing is commonly overlooked - she has an absolute mastery of it as a musical instrument, sort of like an overseas Mariah Carey who doesn't show off and uses it to enhance music that isn't boring, flashy modern R&B. 4) If she appears nude one more time in one of her music videos, I am personally going to start petitioning for the release of Ted Kaczynski just so he can start a new campaign against the offices of MTV.
--Rich Bunnell
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COMMENTS
i adore that woman! i loved the swan dress! bjork's video are odd yet stunning! i do say that oh so quiet is the best video ! it does look like chicago! anyway i got her greatest hits album ! it 's a plus! but oh so quiet is missing! FUCK! I WAS SUPPOSED TO SHOCK AND SURPRISE MY PARENTS AND FRIENDS BY HEARING THIS TRACK YET IT AIN'T HERE ! FUCK OKAY CALM DOWN! i do adore her! you don't have to hear the fucking pop songs to hear her! i heard of human behaveour! but i did heard of all is full of love from stigmata. man goregous and with a cold spacy sweetness to it! a dark drum machine and celestial harpsichord sound! anyhow guys and girls if you want more then get family tree! a six cd box set! anyhow i gotta write my chrisstmas list! i do want the obscure 1981 kiss album music from the elder! bitch if you must! but i heard clips of it from a kiss rockumentery on vh1! i loved a world without heroes! i gotta hear this track! then i gotta get no doubt! why don't you review them? besides i got tragic kingdom! i do want boom box! a box set with all the trimmings! i do want the sims and grand theft auto vice city! by friday i gotta see LOTR: THE RETURN OF THE KING! AS LONG AS I DON'T GET PUSHED AROUND BY FUCKING RAPPERS! THEN I MIGHT GO FOR SCHOOL OF ROCK WITH JACK BLACK! THEN AT NEW YEAR'S EVE I GOTTA SEE THE UNDERRATED MOVIE STRANGE DAYS! NO NOT THE DOORS ALBUM! ANYHOW YA'LL BE COOL! RIGHIT ON!
You americans have been shafted again!! That woman is a talentless no brain-I'm looking for a husband for my illegitemate child-woman, who just happens to have some friends in the industry. How the Jesus Christ did that thing end up in the Olympic ceremony? (see above paragraph)Save your pennies and buy some real music instead.
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I try to stray away from the word "dated" whenever possible, since it's really kind of a stupid word. Trends change, times change, and what was mindblowing at one point is bound to end up seeming out-of-date, even if it's only a few years later when it happens. So I won't criticize Bjork's proper debut album for that, but I do think that her musical approach on here is a wee bit simplistic and thin if you take her musical ambitions into account. This is clearly music of a type that hadn't been performed before - it's definitely pop and relies on dance rhythms of the type that had already been tearing up clubs for several years, but it still has a distinctive aura to it that, at least to my knowledge, hadn't been achieved in the past. The problem is that the music sounds almost totally canned. The soundscapes are supposed to be lush and warm while still bubbling over with the kind of dance-pop fever that gets the kids all excited, but the plug-and-play musical backing way too often sounds flat, programmed and totally antithetical to the unique sound that the album so obviously strives for. I love the vocal performance on "Human Behavior," for example, but the would-be menacing rumbling backing music doesn't quite achieve the thunderous power it clearly should, and the music never really gels.
Where the album excels, and what ends up being its total saving grace, is that the vocal melodies and hooks are spectacular and usually manage to compromise the more pedestrian aspects of the musical backing. Even at this early stage, Bjork is clearly giving the music her all, instilling thumping dance-pop like "Crying" and "Big Time Sensuality" with welcome distinctiveness solely on the sheer power of her voice alone. "There's More To Life Than This" is particularly true of this - musically, there's absolutely nothing distinctive about it at all, but her vocal performance, one moment snidely sly and another triumphantly soaring over the pathetic-sounding beat-box, makes it clear that she realizes this and is actually using the genre as a launching-point for some much-needed lampooning. And when the songs are actually solid compositions on their own as opposed to cleverly-updated dance music, as is most definitely true with the gentle sway of "Venus Is A Boy" and the trance-like, soothing "One Day," don't try to beat them because trust me, it is not possible.
With great songs like these all over the place, I just wish that it didn't all sound so goddamn slapshod and fake at times. Plus, there are a couple of attempts at no-frills balladry and mood music like the cover "Like Someone In Love" and the saxophone-drenched closer "The Anchor Song," but unlike the demanding, upfront string-drenched music people these days so often associate with Bjork, the ballads on here come off more as softer pieces meant to distance the club anthems from one another rather than actual fully-realized compositions of their own. Like pretty much everything Bjork has released, this album is still worth buying, and it's probably the best introduction to her music possible since it shows her at her most conventionally-catchy and distanced from the overbearing sound that some people find irritatingly pretentious.
If at all possible, please try to buy the edition of this album with the single "Play Dead" appended onto the end of the tracklisting, since it's easily one of her best songs, sounding sort of like a cross between the better stuff on this album and the more sweeping, grandiose stuff more typical of the music on Homogenic and the like. I'm not including it in this album's rating since it's a bonus track on my edition, but feel free to raise the album another point if your copy has the song on it.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This album is like Debut with modern, non-contemporaneous production values and a much-needed shot of stylistic electicism, and, song for song, it's probably my favorite Bjork album. I won't talk about the production values, since Nick has recently informed me that I complain about production way too much in my reviews, and since, in all honesty, I really don't care that much about production, devoting such a large amount of space to bitching about it is kind of stupid on my part. The electicism is very much appreciated, however - gone are the bursts of extremely interesting but monotonous light dance tracks, and in their place are weird, fun excursions into frequently unexplored styles like the brassy, big-band bossanova of "It's Oh So Quiet." Speaking of which, I know that saying this is roughly the equivalent of saying "Hey, you should check out that Godfather movie! It's really great!", but if you haven't seen Spike Jonze's music video for the song, see it now -- it's one of the most hilarious and perfectly-choreographed videos I've ever seen, and totally justifies the existence of the art of the music video even though 98% of them are total garbage.
I'll get the caveat out of the way right near the beginning -- in comparison to the more upbeat and interesting songs, the quieter material is downright uninteresting and so slight that it seems like it isn't even there - the closing duo of "Cover Me" and "Headphones," though they do justice to Bjork's ability to fill out a song solely by the power of her voice, aren't really very interesting as songs and bring the album to sort of a weak close. This certainly can't be said of the bass-heavy, pounding industrial groove of "Army Of Me," though, or the..... uh...... bass-heavy, pounding industrial groove of the slightly weaker but still awesome "Enjoy." I'm also quite fond of "Isobel," which has a dramatic...... ah, shit....... bass-heavy, pounding industrial groove. Honest, these songs do sound totally different from one another, it's just that they can all be described in the exact same way and I'm a really crappy reviewer who knows a total of about seventy words. It's my problem, not Bjork's.
The song that takes my breath away to such an amazing degree that it feels like I've been transported to Berlin and pelted with a rain of corporate rocks, though, is "Hyper-Ballad"..... it's a song about standing on top of a mountain and throwing things at the ground just to see them crash against the rocks, and both the musical arrangement and vocal performance of the song are nothing short of amazing..... everything fits together in the most smooth and downright beautiful manner possible. Forget Kim Deal's voice, I want to marry this song. Not Bjork, just this song. Speaking of bizarre subject matter, "The Modern Things" is about Bjork's pet theory that all of the modern things, like cars and such, have always existed, but they've just been waiting inside a mountain for the right moment to come out and take over. I knew all along that the Industrial Revolution was a sham!!!!
I don't think that any Bjork album is worthy of the title "masterpiece," since she always manages to mar her albums somewhat either with songs that don't live up to the absolute amazingness of her best material ("Hyper-Ballad" = great, but "You've Been Flirting Again".......eeeeeeeehhhhh) or with a self-consciously ambitious approach that doesn't always necessarily translate into solid music, but this is definitely her most consistently-enjoyable set of songs. When I first bought it, my roommate and I managed to sync up MP3's of "Army Of Me" with one another using our respective computers, and the result was absolutely amazing. All, of course, due to its bass-heavy, pounding industrial groove.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This is probably Bjork's most popular album, but even though I can easily see why legions of Bjorkites fawn all over it, I'm not as fond of it as a lot of people. The problem, which I've hinted at before, is that she adopts her signature sound on this album, which, much to the delight of Tori Amos fans who had finally found another artist to elevate to godlike drama queen status with a billion Internet fan sites, consists of emotive wailing over a heavy backdrop of strings, often without the backbone of traditional song structure because that's, like, soooo plebeian. It holds together as a coherent whole more than the last two albums (which were pretty much just collections of songs), and it's interesting to hear the gal desperately trying to push the musical envelope with music that she's just sure has never been tried before, but there just aren't very many actual songs on here that hit me in the face as particularly great. The enveloping, sweeping sound exemplified by almost every single song is absolutely gorgeous - it's just too bad that underneath all of the intriguing sound effects and beautiful channel-jumping string fills, there isn't much of anything to grab hold of.
I can throw solid praise towards four of the tracks on here. "Bachelorette" is probably the most hailed song on here, and if you think I'm going to argue with a song with a vocal line so relentless and powerful that it could literally crush me, kick my ass and bury my remains fifty feet under the ground all at the same time and without having to apologize, you have a strange misconception about my sense of bravery. The opener "Hunter" is great too, sort of lacking structure as an actual song but totally succeeding as an aural masterpiece, with a throbbing percussion line jumping all over the place and adding extra musical substance to Bjork's rather minimalistic lyrics ("I'm hunting...... I'm a hunter"). They're nothing compared to what have to be Bjork's two best songs of all time, though, at least in my mind - "Joga" has a lush, building vocal line that might just be her best vocal performance to date and a captivatingly dramatic structure, and "Alarm Call" is one of those songs that restores my faith in the ability of modern artists to craft totally interesting and original material - I have no idea how on earth she was able to write that shifty stop-start melody while still managing to make it catchy as hell, but I am in utter awe when I listen to it. Plus, she says "I'm no fucking Buddhist, but this is enlightenment" in the song, which is great for obvious reasons.
The rest aims to create interesting music and succeeds, as far as I can tell. I don't think I'd ever be able to appreciate aural paintings like "4 Years" or "All Neon Like" as anything more than museum pieces, though, thoroughly interesting music that doesn't really have the structure or melodic meat necessary to make them great songs. Maybe that's not what she was aiming for. It probably wasn't - strange and eccentric as she is, Bjork always seems to be mounting an honest attempt to make music that manages to be challenging, accessible and original all at the same time. It's just that when she reins in her more allegedly-"experimental" tendencies and creates songs as brilliant as the four described above, I wish that she'd do it a bit more often. I respect most of this as good music, but I only literally enjoy about half of the album.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This is going to be a really hard opinion to write without seeming like I'm being a total hypocrite, but I like this album a lot more than Homogenic. Some might snub their noses at me and scoff "What? You complained about the lack of musical meat on the last album, and there's even less of it on here! I'm leaving this website forever and making sure that your heralded reputation as America's all-time greatest movie critic goes right down the crapper!" The album's pretty much exactly like the last one, only with most of the electronic elements demoted into "supporting actor" status and with a greater emphasis on that same "sweep in the absence of songs" deal that I could swear that I was just complaining about a few minutes ago. She's totally treading water, using her unconventional approach to the concept of melody to craft an album that she just knows the critics can't help but love since it's so faithful to the sound that managed to net not only their undying love, but a friggin' Oscar nomination to boot. So why do I like it more? What, do I need to come up with a doctoral thesis or anything? It's a better album.
The key difference between the two albums is that there isn't an upbeat track in sight on here - everything's slow and firmly rooted in her patented hyperballadry. The real kicker, though, is that the lush sound generally isn't used on here as an excuse to pad out impressive but dull aural soundscapes, but rather to act as firm bedding for actual, fully-realized songs. Songs so soft, delicate and charming that Mr. Whipple will kick your ass if you dare try to squeeze them. Granted, it's almost impossible to hear "Cocoon" and "Undo" in the first place, but if you manage to, you'll find out that they're amazing songs, driven by seemingly slight but nevertheless strong and atmospheric vocal melodies. And when the melodies are shoved right in your face, as is most undeniably the case on the dramatic, Eastern-ish single "Pagan Poetry" and the expansive opener "Hidden Place," they really shine as some of her best, even if as songs they don't quite reach the level of, say, "Joga." Or "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)." I had chicken pox when I first heard that song, and boy do I love it now.
On a quiet day, this would be my favorite Bjork album, but I might give Post the slightest little edge since I'm generally more actively impressed by the songs on there. Plus, this one suffers from a dry stretch on the second half consisting of a few songs that might very well be compositional masterpieces on a technical level, but it's not like I'm going to spend countless hours trying to memorize them just so I can say "I'm qualified to appreciate these songs!!" Why should I, when "Unison," the album closer and the song that breaks this dry stretch, is so freaking awesome? I can just listen to that song! In fact, instead of those songs on side 2, I'll just listen to side 2 of Abbey Road! Oh, sure, Paul McCartney doesn't sound a thing like Bjork, but that's where imagination comes into play.
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COMMENTS
This record is weird. Really weird. Lotsa harps, choirs, weird noise-like percussion, and Bjork. This is a really homogenic record (pardon the pun). Most songs sound similar, except for Heirloom, which is kinda different, a bit upbeat? This record is relaxed, any way you see it, and it's not recommended for people looking for danceable music like Debut. Some songs have almost no melody (Harm of Will), but most do, and if you like non-conventional music, is a good record.
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