Bjork

Borrowing a parable dear to Björk, "Homogenic" is essentially about learning to sit still on a chair. About shedding everything that distracts and pulls us away from our inner selves and from the smallest, most intimate realities, reconnecting with the self and its roots, accepting its limits and learning to live with them, and perhaps, for a fleeting moment, sensing with total clarity the shape of that fabled "centre".

The eccentric Icelander's third album is essentially just that, and the more adventurous readers are welcome to skip what follows.

For those who want to uncover the purely pragmatic side of the story, though, we need to wind the calendar back a few years and dwell on a couple of observations.

"Homogenic": a homecoming

It's 1997, and Björk has much of Europe's electronic intelligentsia at her feet: Mark Bell, Goldie, Howie B, Tricky, Leila Arab, Talvin Singh. She's at the peak of her fame as an alternative, eccentric diva, having achieved genuine pop-icon status, writing songs for Madonna ("Bedtime Story", a poor cousin of the memorable "Violently Happy") while the underground scene, almost without exception, hangs on her every word.

Then comes the terrible business of the bomb sent to her London flat, the nervous breakdown, and her return to that island of ice she had fled just a few years earlier, dazzled by the lights of the city.

A homecoming, then. Björk has repeatedly described "Homogenic" as her most "Icelandic" record, though for her that intent certainly didn't translate into some easy folk pivot or some obscure reference to ancient Eddic poetry.

Iceland means, first and foremost, uncontrollable nature, forces as overpowering as they are elemental, danger and boundless allure. All of this surfaces explicitly for the first time in the artist's catalogue: thrilled by the idea of being the first to craft something classifiable as Icelandic techno, she gives life to a new song-form, one that echoes the pulse and the emotional charge of her homeland.

The result is the ten tracks that make up this record, unmistakably and exclusively Björk-ian, a declaration of independence from any generic pigeonholing into which, until that point, the Icelandic artist had somewhat forcibly been squeezed (house, trip-hop, techno, IDM, and so on).

"Jóga" is the most powerful example of this, as well as the most emotionally overwhelming song Björk has ever given to the history of popular music. Dedicated to her lifelong friend (the two even share the same tattoo), "Jóga" is one of those rare cases where an artist's feelings and inner turmoil find total resonance in the cosmos and the surrounding natural world. Having stripped away all metropolitan clutter and having watched her dreams of eternal, all-consuming love affairs collapse, Björk defenselessly acknowledges her own "state of emergency", mirrored in volcanic eruptions, geysers, the crackling of ice, the geological instability of her island, all perfectly distinguishable amid the fractures of deep, jagged beats (also unmissable is Michel Gondry's stunning video, in which the singer's body and the Earth's crust share the same underlying composition).

And yet, throughout all this, there's never a trace of existential depression or nihilistic undertones — quite the opposite: from the instability and uncertainty of her reality, Björk seems to draw an unexpected life force, an uncontainable, pagan joy ("how beautiful to be!"), much like the way living organisms on Earth regenerate themselves. Even the song's structure seems to mimic a circular, potentially endless motion, until the vocals and the string line are finally forced to fade out.

"Alarm Call" will later pick up the same architecture, though dressed in something closer to the electro-pop of "Post": a techno beat, mangled and reshuffled to the point of yielding a hip-hop groove, keeps pressing forward and stalling over and over while her alto voice repeats, to the point of exhaustion, a defiant "it doesn't scare me at all".

Here too the theme is rapture and exaltation in the face of nature, an animalistic call to the most primordial freedom. The risk of veering into some form of religious mysticism is averted, though, by the bold line "I'm no fucking Buddhist, this is enlightenment!", declaimed right at the song's core.

"Homogenic", between melodrama and Stockhausen

The ingredients that make up "Homogenic" are therefore relatively few: electronics, particularly volcanic beats (rumor has it there was a database of over a hundred samples put together with Mark Bell and Markus Dravs), and a double string quartet, because "one wasn't enough to fill out the thickness of those volcanic beats", as she would later state. The most obvious thing that strikes you approaching the album is precisely the masterful fusion of acoustic and electronic, two worlds that Björk had obsessively tried to make coexist since her first proper album, but which only find a mature, fully realized synthesis with "Homogenic".

Machines, after all, have always been an obsession for her and for her island, extraordinarily hi-tech ("all the modern things, like cars and such, have always existed…", the first seeds of which were already sprouting on "Post"). It's a matter, in other words, of finding a third way between her background as a hippie's daughter who studied piano and composition — never entirely shaken off despite being loathed — and her secret love for Kraftwerk and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Icelandic singer's true spiritual father.

"All Neon Like" is in some way her tribute to that "Teutonic" experience, wrapped in an alienating synthetic bubble with purplish-red reflections that makes every sonic input vibrate with unspeakable suggestion, whether it's a bone-dry rhythm section bouncing off and mirrored on its surface, unable to follow any other trajectory, or the bold movement of her voice, capable of ranging within a few bars from a sensual wink to the most dramatic delirium.

"5 Years" and "Bachelorette" are perhaps, in this dialectical interplay, the absolute peak of the album and of Björk's entire artistic quest. The first track upends any notion of synchronicity and regular tempo (Stockhausen again), unleashing an unprecedented rhythm of frequencies and electrical discharges that makes the usual game of stylistic associations impossible. The picture wouldn't be complete, though, without that throbbing orchestral coda (conducted by the ever-excellent Deodato) that blooms in the second half of the track and clings tensely to the synths, tumbling together toward a chaos of nerves, energy and sonic saturation. The second, by contrast, sweeps you away with a less distorted song form, dusting off the noir, vaguely trip-hop outfit of "Isobel". Here too, strings and drum machine live in a relationship of mutual need, tumbling together like a river of tears and blood ("I'm a fountain of blood/ In the shape of a girl", she declares without much preamble). This is Björk at her most melodramatic, once again pouring her excess of passion and impulse into aching, romantic melodies, rendered almost epic by the vigorous arrangements and gushing soundscapes. As if that weren't enough, the pixie manages to pull off a hit single and a heavy-rotation video out of it.

"Homogenic", language and speech

It's often held, not without reason, that if there's a weak link in Björk's chain, it's surely her lyrics, with which the artist seems to have made peace only on the recent "Volta" and "Biophilia". In this respect, "Homogenic" doesn't stray too far from its predecessors (with the notable exception of "Bachelorette", co-written with poet Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson): on the contrary, the clumsy use of language is evident right from the title, which flaunts an adjective that doesn't exist in the Oxford Dictionary, in place of the correct form "homogeneous" ("I'm just an idiot foreigner," she commented afterwards, when the blunder was pointed out to her). Despite this, "Homogenic" is the first attempt to bring order to the lyrical anarchy of her early work.

We are therefore far from any conversion to confessional or politically engaged singer-songwriting — her temperament is too volatile and fiery for that. Björk strives to wield her pen more lucidly and consciously, conveying as unified a message as possible: "Immature", a surprisingly fine piece of trip-soul, sounds like a stern rebuke to the twenty-something who a few years earlier had lamented on city trams "Crying 'coz I need you!", ruefully admitting her more adult, confessional side ("How could I be so immature/ to think he would replace the missing elements in me?"). Maturity, remorse ("5 Years"), fierce independence, a bond with stormy nature, with the solemn "Unravel" as the only concession to understated sentimentality.

But what Björk ultimately seems to realize is the inadequacy of any commonly accepted linguistic expression to externalize her world, an awareness that would reach its most refined artistic expression on "Medúlla". And so it is her animalistic shrieks that end up proving the most effective medium, cutting loose in cathartic unison with Mark Bell's suffocating techno pulse on "Pluto".

"Homogenic", a homecoming?

Having voiced everything that needed to be spat out and denounced, the artist is keen to seal her work with a different message, a sign of an apparent peace found at the end of the tunnel of emotional turmoil, a calm after the storm. Björk brought in Howie B. with the precise task of drawing out of "All Is Full Of Love", the first of the ten tracks to be composed, a sound that would give the listener the impression of a ray of sunshine at dusk, after a stormy day.

"All Is Full Of Love", stylistically a bridge toward the minimalism of the following "Vespertine", shows a positive Björk, looking ahead with the piercing eyes of an unarmed amazon, relaxing without ever settling too comfortably: the final message is still change, an invitation to look at the world through new lenses, to seek out love, in all its possible meanings, beyond every narrowness and habit, to keep searching, to be the huntress always and forever.

And so the circle closes, we come full circle and better understand the meaning of that menacing "Hunter" placed at the opening, probably the album's true manifesto: a dignified acceptance of one's own powerlessness in the face of chaos, the proud assertion of one's status as a drifter and, at the same time, as a solitary huntress never sated with knowledge.

The much-vaunted homecoming can therefore only be temporary: the quest goes on, new shores await Björk, who will set off again even from these peaks, both geographical and, above all, emotional.

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10/06/2012