Björk may be exploring the sonorities of the human voice, but this isn't
a folk record. She may be wailing away with Icelandic and English
choirs helping her, but this isn't a choral record. She may have Rahzel
of The Roots and Dokaka beatboxing away, but it isn't a hip-hop record.
There might be Robert Wyatt, Mike Patton, and Tanya "Tagaq" Gillis (an
Inuit throat-singer), but this isn't some avant-garde record. There's
production and programming from Ensemble, Matmos, Mark Bell, and
longtime Björk/Múm associate Valgier Sigurdsson, but I can't imagine anyone'll call this an electronic record. The question, then, "What the
hell is Björk up to here?," is essentially rhetorical. As one of the
very, very, very few artistically adventurous humans able to straddle
the line between willful experimentation and actual commercial
popularity, Björk is essentially unique unto herself, and so the
uncomfortable uniqueness of Medúlla should hardly come as a surprise.
The fifth proper longplayer for the iconic Icelandic elfin-princess is
her testament to the powers, peculiarities, and flexibilities of the
human vocal cords, and so all its beatboxing and throat-singing and
choirs and the layers upon layers of Björkian wails are the expected
currency that the album trades in. Whilst its artistic fearlessness in
the face of commercial expectation is something the album should always
be applauded for, once you get past the audacious high-concept
conception of the compact disc, the question begs: Is this a worthwhile
follow-up to Vespertine? It was on that album that Björk authored her magnum opus, distilling a distinct palette of
digital-compression-friendly sounds — voice, harp, strings, gentle
flickers of electronic tone — into an album whose joys can never be
undersold. This disc may have a wilder sense of love-and-adventure
about it, and may offer the thrills of an unpredictable ride, but, in
its capriciousness and incongruousness, the thing Medúlla rarely feels like is an album.
The idea behind the record — the idea at its very conception — should
serve to reduce the record to a very specific range of tones, thus
ensuring a stylistic similarity. But, in wishing to explore the
versatility of voice, Björk has authored an outing that can feel jarring
in its shifts, exercises in hypnotic minimalism quickly giving way to
banging beatbox'd beats. The disc only finds its best moment of calm
— "Desired Constellation" — in the most Vespertine-ish moment herein,
where the disc-skipping flickers of Ensemble's programming provide a
sympathetic counter to Björk's most personal performance. It
feels a little ludicrous to hold what is essentially a small black mark
— this non-album/non-flowing-ness — against an otherwise noble
recording, but, after making a work of art as completely and utterly
profound as her last longplayer, Björk had set the bar of expectation
incredibly high, judging this album against its predecessor — and not
against popular music itself — being a harsh standard to measure up to.
Yet, whilst Medúlla may not match her most transcendent work, Björk
still transcends what "peers" in pop music she may be seen as having,
her fifth album a work bravely built on delightful iconoclasm.
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