VIDEO: Björk, "Earth Intruders"
Björk has made a career out of exploring extremes. Tally up the folks who’ve scraped the outer limits of creative and emotional expression with her regularity: you’ve got Prince, Madonna, Hendrix — the A-list goes on. Yet as a maker of albums, she hasn’t seemed interested in capturing more than one extreme at a time. Each of her records tends to operate in a distinct, sustained mode — think of Debut’s woodsy dance tunes, Homogenic’s post-techno torch songs, Vespertine’s hushed laptop hymns.
On Volta (Atlantic), her sixth official studio album (and the follow-up to her 2005 soundtrack to husband Matthew Barney’s film Drawing Restraint 9), Björk breaks with that tradition. Here she offers two kinds of songs: pretty (if enervating) ballads and noisy, cranked-up rockers. The album keeps bouncing between the two, never settling into the kind of groove that, despite her eccentricities, has made Björk a favorite among remixers and DJs. Even more than 2004’s almost entirely vocal-based Medúlla, Volta is her Difficult Album, a work seemingly designed to stymie any attempts to define it.
Some of the more aggressive material is among the most compelling she’s offered. Opener “Earth Intruders,” one of three collaborations with hip-hop producer Timbaland, rattles along on a thrillingly off-kilter beat studded with old-school rave synths and what sounds like soldiers marching through mud. If its intent is to raise awareness of global warming (as several lyrics seem to imply), Al Gore should hook up with Björk forthwith: who wouldn’t gas up his car with dirty diapers to ensure the creation of more tunes like this?
“Innocence,” another Timbo co-production, hits a similarly bonkers bullseye, with Björk pondering “the thrill of fear” over strobe-light keyboards evidently pilfered from the “My Love” leftover pile. And “Declare Independence,” the album’s electro-punk climax, should put the entire New England noisecore scene to shame.
Yet if half of Volta finds Björk reflecting the chaos of our complicated global moment with her most feverish jams yet, the other half sounds as if she’d concluded that we’re already well down the highway to Hell. Older Björk ballads like “All Is Full of Love” and “Possibly Maybe” felt like slow jams from another planet, as action-and-detail-packed as her most assertive music. Much of the quiet stuff on Volta — drawn-out tone poems built atop droning horn charts — is just kinda dull. I can respect the notion of illustrating a culture caught in a death spiral with the sound of lifelessness — which may or may not be Björk’s aim here — but I can’t say I want to hear it more than once. The most unfortunate (and unfortunately titled) casualty of this possibly-maybe goal is “The Dull Flame of Desire,” Björk’s duet with warbly-voiced New York divo Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnson), in which the two singers’ vocal quirks prevent them from communicating much of anything beyond the difficulty of singing and breathing at the same time.
Maybe this more introspective work would’ve made sense on a record devoted to it — as a Madonna-level master of capitalizing on context, Björk could have found a way to put it over. But on Volta, where it’s surrounded by much more gripping stuff, it just feels as if we were being punished for something. Not seeing Drawing Restraint 9, perhaps?
