Her voice, in my view, has always been Bjork’s defining quality. When experienced while listening to The Sugercubes' 1988 debut record, Life’s Too Good, until now with her eighth studio record, the beautiful Biophilia, you cannot escape the chills that voice will give you.
Biophilia is much more than just your standard release, it’s a project that Bjork has taken the time and patience to weave together; a record that, by turns, is hauntingly beautiful and frantically mind-blowing. You never know what you're going to get from track to track and that’s the passion of it. Always looking ahead and never happy to settle with the same sounds as other performers tend to do, she creates a sonic landscape using instruments and sounds that no other artist will dare to even touch. On the second track of the record, “Thunderbolt,” Bjork uses a Tesla coil, an instrument that in basic terms creates electrical currents and in this case is turned into sounds, it just gives her music that one up on everyone else’s. She has mined her previous solo work to bring together something that at times is very familiar, but is also new.
The entire album was produced by Bjork except for the track “Crystalline” which was co-produced by 16bit (you can hear their dubstep influence at the end of the track) but part of this record was also recorded on an iPad. The technology that Bjork uses does not take away the human factor in her lyrics though; if you can decipher them, her words will haunt even the most hardened and stoic listener, as she spins strange and existential lines like “And they say back then our universe wasn’t even there until a setting band and then there was light, was sound, was matter, and it all became the world we know” (from “Cosmonogy”).
Is this a singles record? No, except for maybe “Crystalline” – but this is a record worth checking out if you’re a fan of electronic music that delves into the weird and wonderful, and lyrics that bring you back to earth with a crashing boom. Nature, Music, Technology.
Visit the tracks “Crystalline”, “Cosmonogy” and “Mutal Core” – then and only then you will feel the full-effect of this Icelandic queen's voice and the music she has imagined.
Nature, Music, Technology… Biophilia.
Artist:
www.bjork.com/
www.facebook.com/bjorkdotcom
www.twitter.com/bjork/
Album:
Biophilia is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
