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September 01, 2004

Chilling and challenging

My favorite Icelandic singer released a new album yesterday. Now, I have been a big fan of Madame Bjork since her days with the nominally successful Sugarcubes back in the late 1980's. Her voice has always thrilled and fascinated me. It reaches breathtakingly high and swoops to breathy lows. I discovered her at about the same time I discovered the lovely Kate Bush, wearing out my copy of The Hounds of Love...but that may be a story for another time.

I respect any artist, no matter the medium, who gets out there and does his/her own thing with gusto. Sure, sure, the infamous "Goose Dress" might have been a bad fashion choice. However, have you seen the movie Bjork received her Oscar nomination for? Dancer in the Dark is the saddest movie I have ever seen, bar none. It is filled with stark reality interspersed with escapist fantasy, all the while being terribly tragic. It is a tough movie to watch. Keep the Kleenex handy.

So, about Bjork's new opus: Medulla. (This link is to Amazon, but the cd is on sale at Target for $11.88 this week. Woohoo!) The album, with a few exceptions, is composed of vocal stylings. Just vocals. I thought this would be an interesting "gimmick," and wondered what Ms. B would do with it.

I bought the cd in the afternoon, but did not play it untill the evening. I was lying in bed, reading Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It wasn't going well. I was getting restless, and decided to put in Medulla. GGM was the furthest thing from my mind as I sunk into my comfy bed and absorbed Bjork's latest work. I was exhausted by the time the disc finished playing, not from the hour, but from the intensity of it. New York Times reviewer Jon Pareles had this to say about it:

"Bjork's voice sounds perpetually guileless, an illusion that is helped along by her accented English. It allows her to get away with ideas that might seem absurdly pretentious coming from anyone more overbearing. She can be breathy and girlish, clear and sultry as she seizes a phrase, then almost shattering as her voice crests with a rasp. Her singing sounds impulsive and immediate, yet her voice is deployed as carefully as her backup, which deliberately juxtaposes more polarities: simple and elaborate, organic and synthetic, whimsical and profound."

This couldn't be any more different from the Scissor Sisters, the last band I shamelessly plugged here. Sometimes I like music that is purely for fun and booty-shakin'. Sometimes I want music to envelope me and whisk me away to another place. I am always taking suggestions for new stuff to listen to. Leave me a comment, or drop me an email. What kind of stuff am I missing out there?

Posted by Lisa at September 1, 2004 10:44 AM

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