Björk - Vulnicura

I don't know, maybe all of the best albums made are now going to be dropped, unannounced (or rushed by leaks) on iTunes some day. Maybe year-long promotional campaigns seem silly in retrospect. Don't they, though? Who has the attention span nowadays to wait 5 months for an album from Charli XCX, let alone when it's been sprung across the Atlantic those same five months ago? We'll come to that gripe in my next review (which, coincidentally, shall hopefully not be five months down the line. I really shall try this year to review at least one album a week).

So: Björk. I assume we are all familiar. We're nine albums in now so that makes her a bit of an institution, although one would suppose that many have made a marked impact with many fewer. When it comes to analysing the works of Björk, however, it soon emerges that few - if any - actually rival her when it comes to a collective, frightening, beguiling, challenging, revolutionary musical output. Overanalysis tends to put aside the most obvious and sensitive subjects, though: Vulnicura is a break-up album. Any idiot with a working pair of ears can detect that by the end of Black Lake and those strings. One could draw all sorts of maps about the influences and styles employed - perhaps on a neat little app that might've been slipped into the Biophilia advertising campaign - but soaked in, the immediate sucker-punch of Vulnicura is what makes it so compelling.

You'd be forgiven, in fact, for briefly forgetting her history and getting immersed in an easy, comforting, indulgent opener: 'Stonemilker' is unusually accessible, reminiscent of her Debut days, but charming and richly orchestrated all the same. The subtle nods to her previous works (perhaps following Biophilia's Mutual Core with an album opener with lyrics of mutual coordinates is just coincidence, but not in this romantic's head it isn't) are clever reminders of Björk's need for emotional openness: on Mutual Core she sang "What you resist persists/ Nuance makes heat to counteract distance", and here she reinforces her disappointment with an uncommunicative lover - "Who is open? And who has shut up / And if one feels closed, how does one stay open?" - in the dwindling days of their relationship. The sequential, diary-like nature of the album and her growing fears of said romance make for compelling reading, and on 'Lionsong' even better listening. The uncertainty and dread plaguing her emotional state at the time are translated through stuttered, dragging beats and a perennially ominous string arrangement; never an appealing mix, but it keeps you on your toes. Much could be said of the fact that the briefest song is one of momentary bliss and denial: 'History of Touches' finds Björk waking up in the middle of the night and feeling every sexual encounter she's shared with him to be "in a wondrous time lapse".

Of course, the perfect antidote to this brief glimmer of hope would be in excess of ten minutes and titled something so obviously dreadful and bleak as 'Black Lake'. The first track to be subtitled as "after" the break-up, it's still ripe with cold kiss-offs ("Family was always our sacred mutual mission which you abandoned/ You have nothing to give, Your heart is hollow"). The industrial build-up around four and a half minutes in is thrilling, too, a natural release to her resolution: "I rebelled/ destroyed the icon". To put it bluntly, it'll go down as one of her greatest ever tracks. That glorious breakdown is followed by an uncomfortable, unnerving detailing of the resulting fallout: 'Family' describes "no triangle of love" in terms of her daughter and ex-husband, whilst guest producer the Haxan Cloak is drafted in to spook it all up. Its resolution offers some hope: a series of drawn-out, almost heavenly synths closes the track as Björk maintains that "we can get healed".

The healing process Björk employs is, naturally, an unusual one: 'Notget' finds her using the morbid refrain that "love will keep all of us safe from death", with a colder emphasis on the death with each repetition. Although more renowned for his strewn across the bed, face down, crying into a pillow moments, Antony (and the Johnsons) Hegarty lends a touch of his shimmery, Hercules and Love Affair self to 'Atom Dance': a short revival of the themes of universal synchronicity employed on Biophilia, I suppose. Here the true meaning of Vulnicura emerges (it translates from the latin words for wounds and healing): "Let this ugly wound breathe". If I had to pinpoint a small gripe with the album I suppose it'd be the frenzied clicking and whirring of 'Mouth Mantra' - I'm not sure if I'm just developing a headache with or without its help but it's certainly a niggling sensation.
 

It'd be terribly straightforward to cite the brighter-sounding 'Quicksand' as a positive closer, as a bit of closure, as a sign the wounds are healing, but the small fact that it was written in light of her mother's coma in 2011 throws a darker meaning to the chorus of "if she sinks, I'm going down with her". The closing lines, however, talk of continuity and a refusal to give up; Vulnicura may be, for the most part, a break-up record but its process of healing is what makes the album such an endearing, heartwarming (if not momentarily soul-destroying) one.

Rating: 9/10
Highlights: Black Lake; Atom Dance; Stonemilker; Family; Lionsong
Avoid: n/a

Artwork Watch: I like dandelions. I get unsettled when they look like a PVC vaginaboobed woman covered in syringes. 
Up next: Charli XCX