Review Summary: A masterpiece of intimate emotional landscapes.
Homogenic proved to be Björk’s break out from the form usually expected from a pop album. However unique
Post was, she didn’t really blast out her inner emotions until 1997. In the time between
Homogenic and 2001’s
Vespertine she shone singing her own music in Lars von Trier’s agonizing musical tale
Dancer in the Dark. The music she wrote for this project was a both a continuation of the bold expressivity that flavoured
Homogenic and a hermit-style retreat to the inner world of a troubled character.
This ‘hermit-style’ (as she herself also utters on the album’s final track, ‘Unison’) sensibility is what pervades
Vespertine from beginning to end. As the best albums should, this one drags you into its atmosphere on the first track, luring you into a ‘Hidden Place’, over a drone-like accompaniment that features a chord that comes from nowhere and has nowhere to resolve – it’s an indecisive sonority. The chorus sings snippets of Schoenberg, the beats are remarkably buried into the drone. The hidden place she seems to be drawing us into is in a private room, in a dark, cold winter, preferably under the sheets.
The funny thing about
Vespertine is that whilst most, if not all of the songs, are love songs, a well-worn terrain by pop musicians including Björk herself on her first two albums. Although numbers like the synth and microbeat-backed ‘Cocoon’, the almost tangibly warm IDM-song ‘Heirloom’ and the soaring, luminous closer ‘Unison’ are undeniably love songs, they don’t ever conform to a blueprint, with sentences like “when I wake up/the second time in his arms/gorgeousness/he’s still inside me!!!” or “warm-glowing oil into my wide throat”. The interchanging of dreamlike imagery about intimate unity and blatant sexual statements is what sets those songs apart.
The musical world of
Vespertine drips of frozen water, with music boxes, celestas and harps, all instruments that die out after their first impact with their sound stagnating in the air. The arrangements are unbelievable throughout the album, with ‘Frosti’ showcasing the music box with a melancholy but blissful air. The melodic harp playing in coda of the most catchy, poppy song here, ‘It’s Not Up To You’ (“there’s too much clinging/to peak/there’s too much pressure”) is a weird, but appropriate bridge between it and the soothing warm bath of ‘Undo’. ‘Undo’ admonishes us to “surrender” to the trials and tribulations of life in order to transcend ourselves. The sine-tone synths by Thomas Knak underlying the song are comforting, and when the beat and synths die out and the choir, strings and multi-tracked Björk lyrics tumble over another, sometimes troubling the perception of what is sung or how many lines are stacked up, you can’t do anything but surrender and get submerged into the incredible beauty at hand here.
The darker moments, which are almost kinky, are the Björk classic ‘Pagan Poetry’, with its louder, agitatedly sexual atmosphere with beats reflecting onto walls, the music box and harp climbing up and down in unison and Björk celebrating dark and almost primordial intimacy, the purest form of love. Not many songs can repeat the phrase “I love him” for so many times and get away with it. The brooding ‘An Echo, A Stain’ juxtaposes sentences from Sarah Kane’s unrelentingly dark
Crave into a lyric about dependency, visceral physicality and something more obscure and foreboding. This theme of dependency resonates, too, in the nearly (and perhaps luckily so, in order to retain its sense of wonder) undecipherable ‘Harm of Will’, with a lyric by Harmony Korine that hints at a beautiful but risqué and saddening kind of sex.
The diatonic bliss of ‘Aurora’, again enhanced by something that is as fairy-tale-like as it is risqué (“I tumble down on my knees/fill my mouth with snow”, I beg you), is a marvellous interplay between the harp, the music box, the celesta and the choir and is probably the best condensation of the album’s overall sound. Björk’s first attempt at setting an e.e. cummings poem to music, with ‘Sun In My Mouth’, is a beautifully subdued and poetic little number on the album.
Vince Mendoza, along with Björk herself, provides the orchestrations and the choral arrangements on the album, with a middle-size symphony orchestra and a female choir backing her up and providing angelic choruses (as on ‘Hidden Place’, ‘Unison’), shivering tremolos (‘Sun in my Mouth’, ‘Harm of Will’), soaring Ravel-like moments as we have seen on
Selmasongs (for example on ‘It’s Not Up To You’) and eerie soundscapes (‘An Echo, A Stain’). The way the arrangements play with dissonances, with stacked-up chords, the mixing of various arrangements on top of another, is never unsettling, but it creates a lot of the mood of the album, bringing an incredible richness to its sound. No albums since those by Nico in the ‘70’s have made such an effective use of arrangements to define their overall sound, and there are few albums even now which are able to do that.
For some songs beats have been created by electronic wizards Matmos, following rhythmic blueprints of Björk’s own making, and some of the most amazing beats evoke the world Björk describes, of domesticity, snow and miniscule objects swiftly passing the scene. The beats may be most easily comparable to a close-up, high-contrast shot of someone getting goose bumps as their lover touches them.
All these poetic and unrestrained descriptions of big time sexuality make this the Björk album with the greatest libretto. All these gentle little brushstrokes, flecks of luminous, celestial light and subconscious dark make it an impressionistic masterpiece of shading and atmosphere. This utter control of nuance marks
Vespertine as one of Björk’s many career highlights, and maybe the best entry in the album-form she has ever put out (considering
Biophilia as standing outside the album-form), and one of the best albums of the 2000’s overall. To paraphrase ‘Pagan Poetry’: “I love her, I love her, I love her, I love her. I love her, I love her, I love her, I love her.”
