Medulla
Elektra
She comes from the land of ice and snow, to subjugate us once more with her whimsical grandeur-just like those kittens on the Internet singing Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song." But avant-cuteness has always been just the tip of Björk's iceberg. At first, her sixth studio album seems like an electro-dork's take on MTV's old "Unplugged" gambit. With just occasional swathes of synthesizer to keep it decent, her bare voice wantonly intermingles with tracks created entirely out of noises made by humans: vocal ensembles Icelandic and British, human beat-boxes, Inuit throat singers, gentle art-rock vet Robert Wyatt, and hard-rock trickster Mike Patton-plus, chorus upon chorus of Björks, multi-tracked into infinity.
Sure, it's high-concept: Björkapella. But it's no mere gimmick. She hinted at this strategy on 2001's Vespertine , where her vocals pulsed along with music seemingly keyed to her own internal rhythms instead of getting lost in technoid tangles. On Medulla, her voice is in constant motion, in sync with the beat, rather than battling it, whether she's running uphill (the orgasmic gasps of "Pleasure Is All Mine") or just bobbing weightlessly ("Vokuro"). And though she still interpolates so many si-i-i-llah-aaahh-buh-UHUH-lle-esss into a lyric you'd think that she was paid by the vowel, there's a new sense of gravity-defiance in her delivery-she practically glides through "Oceania."
Lately, Björk has been talking up Spike Jones-the sound-effects-happy 1950s bandleader, not the skateboarding auteur. And you can hear his pretension-leveling influence when former Roots mouth-organ Rahzel upstages a gravely ponderous choir on "Where Is the Line." But Björk's layered vocal weirdness and stated desire to reclaim the "primitive and silly" more distinctly echoes Zap Mama, a group of Afro-Euro cosmopolitans who reclaimed pygmy chants as the ultimate in world-pop escapism. The medulla is the region of the brainstem that regulates the heartbeat and respiratory system. Leave it to a woman who once sang about wanting to "organize freedom" to find peace by journeying to the center of her mind. Valhalla, she is com-in-in-in-ing.
Grade: B+
See Also: Meredith Monk, Volcano Songs (ECM)
