Björk, this delicate flower that we came to know from the cute, pink early albums, now stands like a volcano moments away from erupting, teeming with the tension of a still, dewy sky marred by the calm before a storm.
drawing from a fountain of non-traditional ideas of beauty and power, drawing away from Western culture, drawing away from her new ‘home’. On the album’s cover, Björk stares out at us decorated in shimmering silver satin, an Alexander McQueen-designed kimono, her marble-black eyes piercing the luminant frosted surface, face fixed into the stoic post-mortem rictus of Cleopatra and co. No album has so instantly rushed tears to my eyes, a lucent imparadise to Post’s abrasive club-inspired and -infused sensationalism this is a folktale, where Björk’s snake-skin identity blurs between princess, warrior, alien, and angel. The line “I thought I could organise freedom/How Scandinavian of me” declares Björk’s feeling of displacement at the time losing the anarchic Icelandic sense of wild freedom amidst the pressures of the music industry (wanting to take a break from music she felt a pressure to keep recording in order to pay the team around her) in a way sparks this album as Björk at her most free, trying desperately to pry herself loose from the trappings, it’s a musical overcompensation, a rising up of the warrior’s heart within. There is an immediate irony, Björk’s riddles, struggles, and contradictions rolling and incessant as her drums, creating an album about her ‘home’ in Iceland-a country without an army. Debut and Post’s nervous energy gives way to Homogenic’s percussive opening track, “Hunter”, its drums thundering forward like an unstoppable premonition of war.
0 kommentar(er)
