Bjork
“Desired Constellation”
from Medulla
Elektra, August 2004
When that celestial choir introduced us to Bjork’s “Hidden Place” at the beginning of her fourth album, 2001’s Vespertine, we were being drawn into a place she was never gonna leave. All the gorgeous, huge-sounding film-score orchestration and choral work obscure it at the time, but it turns out Vespertine was the last gasp for Bjork the pop artist. Since then the balance of her arrangements has tipped solidly from pleasure to texture, and her vocal melodies meander even more than usual, like jotted-down poetry set to music on the spur of the moment. The artist who pushed against pop and dance songcraft with more devil-may-care abandon than any act since early Roxy Music is gone. What’s left is comparatively formless art that can occasionally delight and awe, but if it ever again consistently produces stuff that hits as hard as the “Army of Me”/”Hyperballad”/”The Modern Things” suite, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
“Desired Constellation,” though. Hoo boy, “Desired Constellation.” Taken from Bjork’s most Experimental-with-a-capital-E record, the almost entirely constructed from human vocals Medulla, it’s one of her few late-period compositions that measures up to her earlier work in terms of both melodic directness and emotional impact. It occurs to me now that the song is structured, surely deliberately, as an echo of her all-time best song, arguably the best song of the 1990s, “Hyperballad”: Sung from the point of view of a person who’s secretly working through a major problem with her relationship all on her own, it alternates casually, conversationally sung verses explaining the ritual she’s quietly performing to try to get around this emotional roadblock with a heartrendingly massive, belted chorus expressing just what the problem is in no uncertain terms. Confronted with the knowledge that someone has sacrificed on her behalf in a way she knows she doesn’t really deserve, Bjork sings of taking “a palm full of stars” and throwing them like dice, over and over, “until the desired constellation appears”–fudging her life and thoughts until she either genuinely deserves what’s been done for her or can justify not deserving it to herself. “It’s slippery when your sense of justice murmurs underneath and is asking you: How am I going to make it right?”, she sings, the latter phrase repeated over and over as the song’s chorus. Juxtaposed against the song’s minimal instrumentation–a shimmering two-note tonal bed and a barely audible pitterpatter of percussion–the line is devastating, and in a career full of throat-shredding vocal performances, her delivery of it is perhaps the rawest she’s ever been. Her voice at times buckles under the onslaught of the line’s high, sustained notes, and at one point ist transmuted into a wordless howl. “How am I going to make it right?” is no idle, rhetorical question, it’s a cry of utter desperation. She has no idea.
Portishead
“Nylon Smile”
from Third
Mercury, April 2008
In “Nylon Smile,” Portishead take this basic sentiment of emotional unknowing still further, from desperation into something approaching actual terror. Over an undulating backing track peppered with sickly guitar and sounding like some Lynchian take on mid-century exotica–contrast its sinuous unpleasantness with “Desired Constellation”‘s vulnerable comfort–singer Beth Gibbons recounts a state of complete emotional paralysis: she’s unable to enjoy herself, unable to improve herself, unable even to explain how she feels, because she simply has no clue why the person who loves her, loves her. “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you, and I don’t know what I’ll do without you,” she sings. Again, this isn’t a rhetorical construction, a “gee I sure am lucky” sigh of relief–Gibbons sounds absolutely panicked that she couldn’t possibly recreate the conditions under which she landed this comforting presence if she tried, and that some godawful abyss would open up under her if it went away. Perhaps most harrowing of all is the way the song simply stops, as if she simply can’t bear to address the issue any longer for fear of irrevocably ruining…everything.
Very interesting post. And you just cost me money.
[Sorry to say it was via iTunes, not the Amazon links.]
Maybe I need to give Medulla another listen. I don’t think I’ve listened to it since I bought it, when – in all honesty – I put it away after one listen because it sounded really damn goofy.
Am I to infer from this that you’re not a fan of Volta? I think it’s been unfairly dismissed by many Bjork fans I don’t understand why.
Paul: Rats! Well, I hope you enjoy your purchases anyway.
Tim: Like you I’ve barely listened to Medulla, OR Volta. It’s like, look, not-as-good Bjork is still pretty good, and if I can genuinely enjoy the Knife’s opera or Antony’s less song-y EP deep cuts (to name a couple of comparable recent works) I can certainly enjoy Medulla and Volta too. But because she had such great stuff in the past that was SO much more direct and enjoyable to me, I find myself yearning to listen to that instead. It’s not that I don’t like Volta, it’s just a different flavor than what I’m usually looking for when I’m in a Bjork mood. (A similar phenomenon is maybe Chosen Lords or the bulk of Drukqs–fun enough, but Selected Ambient Works and Richard D. James Album beckon!)
I wanted to enjoy Chosen Lords much more than I think I actually did – I wish he had just chosen to release all the music from that series of 12″s on CD and not just cherry pick at his whim. I’m too old to be a vinyl guy, was never a vinyl guy, and I kind of get pissy when artists play the vinyl-only game in the era of MP3s and iPods. (Tegan & Sara are going to be releasing a box set with some vinyl-only demos and I’m similarly pissed off about that.)
I dunno, though – is Volta that much different in execution from, say, Homogenic? It’s got some poppier rock songs, some simmering ballads, some noisy stuff. I even like Antony’s contributions, and for some reason I usually find his voice to be like nails on a blackboard. (He’s OK with Hercules & Love Affair, too.)
I don’t think the song-ier Volta stuff hits as hard as Bachelorette, Hunter, Joga, Alarm Call, or All Is Full of Love, no. (I love Antony in any context.)
Agreed on vinyl, although in Richard’s defense, vinyl makes more practical sense for dance (or “dance” if you will) music than for indie-rock fetishism.
My point with Bjork is not that the later stuff isn’t good, just that it isn’t good in the way the earlier stuff was good, a way that I prefer all things considered.
Now I’m listening to Unravel and it’s hurting me inside. Thanks a LOT, Tim.