ALBUM REVIEW BJORK - BIOPHILIA

With the name itself, there is no need for introduction to her pure originality in her musical dictatorship. Bjork often be mentioned in the aspect of becoming one with her music and she became so respectful that the majority agrees to separate her music into an individual sub-category. She came all the way from the Debut in 1993, to high time Homogenic-Vespertine, through Medulla the non-instrument album. These achievement proves her ability to explore and experiment whatever in her head and projected them right out with her very bold confidence. Biophilia the eighth studio album came out earlier this month convinced the fact that she still continue to show what she capable of. Meanwhile, among those achievement, the question rose whether has she will be able to top her own masterpieces?

I don’t take heed about her multi-disciplinary to set her music ahead of time on turning music into an iPad apps. and, like many of us, I don’t think this is a good step at all to put Apple customer audiences first. The idea of the visual/music is great when it is optional choice for those who already fully absorbed music and wants to explore more about her “Universe”. Like it or not, I believe they should somehow release the CD/Vinyl for many of us who are left out.

In Biophilia, Bjork seems to surpassed into another level of her musical artistry. Not that she becomes so out-of-space (which she has already archived that title for so long)  but she seems not to interest about human and their emotions, beliefs and thoughts anymore and starts a revolution over those topics. Hence the main topic of Cosmology, Earth and Science that are extremely rare in any musical scenes. On her first song Moon she talks about yes, the moon but that also a melancholic way to talk about life and rebirth. The album was seems to be driven by merest progressiveness for each songs has to rely on one another to create the rises and falls, each of them slowly turns into another. Then Thunderbolt, we can hear the Tesla thunder coil, one of many experimental instruments here. Crystalline, the brightest of entire album, sprinkled by the chimes of Gamaleste and ends with the infamous 47 seconds of Drum & Bass hailstorm. It swipes the song out of the place and cannot bring us back to the same track again. There are so many experimental instruments on this album many of them works, many does not, but the best instrument still be Bjork’s voice with her personal singing style and those poetics lyrics. After Crystalline there are few more interesting tracks like Cosmonogy, the lullaby track about how the universe was created and Mutual Core where those hard beats comes back again.

Apart from these tracks, it feels like floating around in dark vast space where words fly in and out forever. Despite the fact that she is very great at writing exquisite lyrics, she often let the hollowness speaks for itself. There are some songs like Dark Matter that filled with spooky sound and Hollow which is so long that It sounds like it will never end. The story of Earth and Universe go along very well with poetic lyrics but they also create a huge space between listeners. We cannot feel gut-wrenchingly lonely the way we listen to Play Dead or like a human touch when we listen to All is full of Love. Instead, all we get to hear is Bjork and how she contemplates the surrounding then filters them inside-out.

For this album, Bjork fans (including me) were obviously polarized into those who like it and those take this as their least favorite. I don’t think I should jump down the band wagon to give it more listens in order to fully embrace the message as if Bjork was a meta-human that deserve a special way to approach. To me, I think I don’t hate it and it is not the least favorite but I just don’t like the iPad idea. I think of it as another attempt to create her conceptual art into music. Biophilia goes great when added to discography and Bjork is still as creative and genuine as she always been.

Crystalline video Bjork works with her long-time collaborator, Michel Gondry again. The song is about crystal and how it grows and the video is almost exactly like that. I like the artwork in the video, not sure who did it but let me guess it is done by M/M Paris, her top favourite art designers.