Review Summary: An intense experiment in perfect equilibrium. An accomplishment of sorts, considering the fine line it's treading.
With the world’s best artists one can always keep on wondering how can they think something up, something entirely new that surpasses high expectations and still feels as if it organically follows from what they have done before. That wonder always strikes me if I think about Björk’s discography. Even her breaches with the things she has done before seem completely logic when you think about it. She’s been experimenting with arrangements and instrumentation since 1993’s
Debut, got really stubborn on
Homogenic and this all culminated on
Vespertine, which should definitely get an award for best-arranged album of all time.
So, then comes
Medúlla, where she stops using her string orchestras, celestas and harps completely. Almost the only thing heard on the album is the human voice. Sampled, recreated, layered, manipulated, but even in its most electronic manifestations, it all sounds very laryngeal. Not as one larynx, though, because Björk has attracted an impressive list of guest vocalists on the album. Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq breathes and growls rhythmically, Mike Patton does some of his most positively evil-sounding voices, and beat boxers Rahzel and Dokaka provide two very different cultural types of urban beats.
Because of these guest vocalists it’s hard to describe exactly what kind of a genre
Medúlla should belong to: it’s tribal, it’s urban, at times virtually sacred but overall it is very experimental. Indeed, the album may be better put into a category with Stockhausen’s
Stimmung or Meredith Monk’s work in its untameable audacity.
That’s not to say this is as acquired a taste as Stockhausen or Meredith Monk. Björk can still craft some of the most amazing pop tunes while not straying from the concept she has created. ‘Who Is It (Carry my Joy on the Left, Carry my Pain on the Right)’ is an incredibly memorable and hummable pop tune, and the hip-hop flavoured album closer ‘Triumph of a Heart’ sticks as easily as any melody Björk has ever created. The amazing accessibility of these songs as well as their purity on its own is a proof that Björk is on the right side of the very fine line she is treading going through with this experiment.
On the other side there are the a cappella, stripped-down experiments. These are mostly ambient pieces except for the solo melody ‘Show Me Forgiveness’, which reflects on artistic doubt and self-forgiveness. 'Öll Birtan’ is a layered, luminous waltz which plays with improvised lyrics and modal counterpoint. If you dislike Björk’s gibberish outbursts this may not be quite for you, but especially in those outbursts she really shows what her voice can say without really
saying anything. The duet ‘Ancestors’ showcases Tagaq’s and Björk’s vocal harmonies with feral, primordial groans, a tender, hopeful piano in the background and unfolds in waves, with crescendo’s, decrescendo’s, leaps and a tensely evolving structure. ‘Miðvikudags’ is perhaps the most nervous and unsettling vocal experiment on here, with a cooing melody, clicks and strident dissonances emerging from layering multiple melodies, like in Maurice Ravel’s piece ‘Frontispice’ (listen to it, it follows the same procedure).
Then there are the song experiments, the songs betwixt both categories. The dark, tender reverie ‘Pleasure Is All Mine’ that serves as an opener to this album and introduces us with ambiguous major and minor harmonies, leading to a jazzy, laid-back and slightly feminist song about generosity: “when in doubt give” leads to the tam-tam hit at the climax of the number before it disintegrates again. The aggressive segue to this is ‘Where Is The Line’, which is a brutal song about someone who asks too much and abuses generosity. The harsh atonality in sections of this number makes it one of the most poignant moments of the album. The electronic manipulation creates a dirty, even icky atmosphere. This is a song that refuses to settle down and accept, which makes it all the more intriguing. It’s followed by one of the moments of utter stillness on the record: a choir arrangement of a voice-and-piano song by Jorúnn Viðar, the Icelandic composer. Björk’s Icelandic pronunciation, with [r]’s like a tender mountain stream, add a wonderful sound quality to the impeccable arrangement, which shifts through major and minor before finally settling.
‘Submarine’, recorded with Robert Wyatt, is a small theatrical piece in which Björk orders herself to come out of easy, comfortable situations: “when will it be time/to document/this submarine behaviour/do it now”, with a sea of deep vocals, and Wyatt imitating a submarine. Its pensive mood and layered vocals at first submerge Björk’s singing, who then rises above it. Seems conceptual, doesn’t it? Another maritime-themed track is ‘Oceania’, the 2004 Olympics song, which is made from a beautiful beat box with a choir sample imitating waves, whales and maelstroms with Björk singing a hymn to the evolution theory, and all life forms are related. ‘Oceania’ has a fittingly anthemic quality to it, and the vocal performance is stunning.
The most beautiful, stunning song on all of
Medúlla though, is ‘Desired Constellation’, an ambient haze made of vocal samples with microscopic clicks from audio cutting and pasting dominates this song which has a very
Vespertine-like quality (it was made out of the vocal for ‘Hidden Place’). Björk wonders about how she can be fittingly reciprocal in one of the most beautifully yearning melodies she ever wrote. The imagery of “a palm full of stars/I throw them like dice/on the table […] until the desired constellation appears” is so haunting, original and moving that this central track deserves a nod as a stand-
out song on the album.
Björk’s third e.e. cummings poem is a choir piece with an avant-simplicity and a little meandering melody, which works as well as ‘Sun In My Mouth’ did on
Vespertine – as a small and blissful poetic interlude. ‘Mouth’s Cradle’, another real highlight, with beat boxing reminiscent of Brazilian carnival percussion, is a song about protecting yourself and your loved ones from the evils (‘the osamas and bushes’, back then) of the outside world. It uses a cut-up vocal sample, Tagaq’s groans, and a choppy melody. A choir provides a mysterious harmony to the song, which once again doesn’t seem to want to settle into major or minor, and at the end bursts out into an emotional desperation, very distorted sounds and a luminous climax.
The concept didn’t stop, though, with the crafting of the songs and the a cappella-idea. The laughably long subtitle of ‘Who Is It (Carry my Joy on the Left, Carry my Pain on the Right)’ seems to have consequences for the album. If you listen to this album very carefully on good headphones in stereo, you’ll notice that most of the major-key motives are played on the left speaker and most of the minor-key motives are played on the right speaker, thus creating the ambiguity that struck me in many of the songs.
Through its concepts, both lyrical and musical, it seems like a search for balance in oneself, for affirmation and for a natural flow between wanting to experiment and still wanting to appeal to people, a natural flow in one’s mind and in one’s body. The album is filled with anatomical metaphors: “a skeleton of trust/right beneath us/bone by bone/stone by stone” she sings on ‘Who Is It’, the lips and hands of cummings’s poem, the teeth, mouth and bones in ‘Mouth’s Cradle’ and ‘Triumph of a Heart’ which details having found the flow she searched for in ‘Pleasure Is All Mine’ and how it finds its way through the body: “the stubborn trunks/of these legs of mine/serve as pathways/for my favourite fuel/heading upwards towards my kidneys” (read this twice, it’s kind of kinky).
Medúlla is so dazzling in its conception that one might wonder whether it is all coincidence. It’s a closed cycle work, a creation of total equilibrium. It’s almost
too perfect a system.
Oh yeah, there’s a second thing one might wonder about the world’s best artists all the time. How can they make something of such an incredible, sensible perfection and still make it appear like it’s totally organic, incredibly real and delivered as if it were all coincidence? I guess coincidence makes sense only with Björk.
