Review Summary: If you put out so much masterpieces, even an excellent album feels like a disappointment.
Of all Björk albums, I’ve waited longest to review
Volta, which is also probably the most problematic entry in her entire oeuvre.
Debut, the album I least favorably reviewed, had both the charms and the flaws of a first effort. With
Volta, Björk had well advanced into one of the most stunning careers in pop history. That’s not to say that this is a bad album in any way: it’s never dull, it surprises, explores some concepts she hadn’t discovered yet and marks a return to a more straightforward side of song craft. Sometimes.
The album cover is buoyant: a screaming red backdrop with, dressed in a rainbow bird plumage, Björk, whom you have to cut up in order to access its interior. This matches the overall feel of the album well: Björk cutting her self-accustomed 2000’s work up in order to find something more basic, more tribal at its core. Hints of the tribal were already overwhelmingly present on 2004’s
Medúlla, but here Björk tries to convey it full-on, complete with non-western instruments, big rhythm sections and politics interwoven into her lyrics.
The packing of all these elements into the album, creates a “relentless restlessness” as Björk herself calls it on ‘Wanderlust’, the second track on the album and a song most accurately describing the poetics of this album. That means listeners have to accept her every whim and her drifting-off from time to time. I am willing to do that, as most of the tracks are genuinely beautiful, but as a consequence, the album feels like her least holistic work since 1995’s
Post.
Björk attracted Timbaland and Danja to co-write and produce two of the albums tracks, which both feel compressed into too small a space, and suggest Björk’s voice is chasing their vibe but not quite getting to it. ‘Earth Intruders’ feels like a dream on the peak of a tropical fever, assembling elements from all kinds of African music with Björk describing the “turmoil, carnage” of a non-specified invasion. ‘Innocence’, the other collaboration, has some of Björk’s most beautiful lyrics, but with its clipped vocal samples, harsh sawtooth synths and pounding bass drums, it doesn’t live up to its promise. It’s a lyric deserving better music.
So, that’s for the Timbaland entries, because the other concepts on this album are way more interesting, and already become apparent in the interlude between ‘Earth Intruders’ and ‘Wanderlust’, with melancholy and solace in a morose composition for boat horns amid a harbour landscape: a point of departure and a point of arrival. In the case of ‘Wanderlust’, in which she directly links the boat horns into her brass arrangement, it’s a departure. She’s tired of the things she knows and wants to move on. The brass arrangement refuses to settle: the harmonies are mostly provided by the horns and the trombones, with the tuba doing muddy boat horn sounds and the trumpets playing high clusters on top. The beats are a big, restless rhythm and add suitable dynamics to the composition, although they aren’t as interesting as the things she did on
Vespertine.
The brass section and arrangements are amazing throughout: ‘Dull Flame of Desire’, a strangely alienating duet between her and Antony Hegarty, has the both of them recite a poem in a constant crescendo over an ostinato. It’s like a dark, lyrical wink to Ravel’s ‘Boléro’. It sometimes feels like there are three duets going on at the same time: the duet between two Björks, another one between two Antonys and those duets engaging in another duet with one another. The understated subtlety exploding into a full-on crescendo is a beautiful effect. In a way, the same happens on ‘Vertebrae by Vertebrae’, which samples ‘Hunter Vessel’ from
Drawing Restraint 9 whose harmonies already guarantee an extreme intensity. It marches effortlessly through its 5 minutes with a cloud of hot steam building up throughout. The lyric, about returning to nature and animal impulses, is dark and finds Björk wanting to escape the obstructions humanity and culture have given us, and expand on
Medúlla’s obsession with anatomy.
The natural counterparts surrounding this are ‘I See Who You Are’, a softly bubbling river of a song, which has a sensuality and femininity to it which appears to reference either her daughter or a female lover (or, in the best case, both). Towards the end of the song a more ominous soundscape of foreboding brass. The gently tickling pipa adds a very specific texture to it, and the western/non-western dichotomy feels naturally at work here. The anatomy is back in sentences like “later this century/when you and I have become corpses/let’s celebrate now/all this flesh on our bones”. It’s a slight beauty of a song. ‘Pneumonia’ is a quiet moment after ‘Vertebrae by Vertebrae’'s plea to "let off some steam". It still bears a lot of darkness because of the brass arrangement, but it feels as if it's going in circles for no clear way. Björk coos to someone that she has to “get over the sorrow”, comforting her with the notion that things, including the bad, are here to stay.
With ‘My Juvenile’, a song (once again with Antony) that might be a bit too slight, albeit nicely crafted with its diatonic clavichord treatments, closing the album, it’s a good thing Björk stirs things up a bit before that. The very overtly political lyric to ‘Hope’, about moral dichotomies surrounding a suicide attack by a supposedly pregnant woman, works out quite splendidly. It displays doubt, feminism, Weltschmerz and hope and wonder all at the same time. The clavichord and kora exchange ostinato patterns and improvisations, and the marriage of western and non-western is very accomplished here, as it’s very difficult to tell where either one starts or ends.
The industrial clanging of ‘Declare Independence’ by now has become a Björk classic and the reason she can’t get into China (and, if it were ruled by Lars von Trier, probably Denmark, too) anymore. It builds pressure with the Mark Bell track surrounding it juxtaposed with the brass section from ‘Hunter Vessel’, and Björk ascending into a screaming climax with a fervent “raise your flag!” which is nearly as exciting as 'Pluto' on
Homogenic, although less genuinely intense.
It’s a pity that so much fuss was created about the Timbaland cooperation, as Björk is a far more gifted musician than Timbaland is, and the songs he co-wrote are the album’s weakest tracks. Björk tries for her roots but finds them on only a few songs, with ‘My Juvenile’ and ‘Pneumonia’ not hitting her regular mark of quality control and ‘Wanderlust’ not quite exploring new territory. The situation of the album, with the harbour sounds, is genius though, and puts even the weaker songs into a refreshing context.
The best moments of
Volta are those where Björk manages not just to display her poetics as on ‘Wanderlust’, but bring them into practice, in this case by mixing the western and the non-western (‘I See Who you Are’ and ‘Hope’) or mixing fervent, harsh electronics with the instrumental work she produced on
Drawing Restraint 9 ('Vertebrae by Vertebrae', 'Declare Independence').
Volta is a well-crafted, dynamic album, but it’s a bumpy road and not all concepts come off as quite satisfying. It’s so much better than the average pop album, but seen in Björk’s discography the only way you can look at it is with a sense of disappointment. Until 2007, she had been on a 12-year streak of classic albums, a classic film and a superb piece of contemporary classical music, and in 2011 she would continue this winning streak with
Biophilia.
Volta is an enjoyable effort, but being not transcendental, it’s a small drawback for Björk's claim to the top.
