Bjork’s newest is both a departure and an affirmation, and you can see it right there on the cover. On the at-the-time shocking departure (into electronica) that was Debut she confronted us head-on, demanding our attention. Post repeated that frontal pose, only in even more arresting bright colors and with lush allusions to world travel. Telegram found her dancing in the dark to the tunes she’d wrought, while on Homogenic she hid her persona behind a sophisticated, forbidding mask. She looked like a multicultural ice queen, infinitely more elegant and poised than the sliced, spliced and barely coherent title character from Selmasongs, from her lone movie soundtrack.

That unusual album was all about scars, recorded with orchestral accompaniment. However, here on Vespertine, she says it all by swooning. Musical metaphors exist alongside the visual ones for her journey. The expansiveness she expressed on her first two albums led to complexity on the third, which sounded in part like an escape to a private cave. Homogenic was as insular, hermetic, and sealed off as the dragon lady on the cover.

On Vespertine, she’s not just ducked back into the shadows. She’s moved in, found her home at last, and found what grows in that private, nurturing shelter. With all her talk of swans and eggs, it’s clear Bjork at home alone is highly fertile. She's immersed in eroticism personally, and in sensuality in general.

The songs on this wonderful record open up Bjork’s music again. They leave behind the violent, abrasive percussion found on both Homogenic and Selmasongs, but not the aesthetic of making music with sounds from the real world. Rather than factories and cities and industrial technology, this time Bjork’s gotten quiet and tuned into paper clips and pencils and little noises of things dropping and bouncing and dripping.

Vespertine is getting reviewed as Bjork’s lullaby album, as if it’s all about soothing. Sure, she’s taken inspiration from some of her most melodious previous work. "Venus as a Boy’s" propulsive, comforting rhythms are here, as is the all-or-nothing tension of the exquisite "Hyper-Ballad."

Bjork has said (in an excellent interview which may still be up at cdnow.com) that “All is Full of Love,” the final track from Homogenic, was her doorway into this collection. Certainly, one can see how that subtle, mantra-like affirmation would lead to this very immersive, intimate collection.

But, let’s face it, even with the award-winning and beautiful video that accompanied that headphone song, it was kind of … slight. It was a mood, not a story, and it only went so far. Other influences must be counted, like the chiming tones of the one new track among the remixes on Telegram, “My Spine.” Count the squelchy burps and clanks from “5 Years” and “In the Musicals” as progenitors as well.

So, how to describe these new marriages of melody and noise? “It’s Not Up To You” is both a dismissal and an affirmation, an act of boundary-drawing that can be as perplexing as it is liberating. “Undo” and “Pagan Poetry” are dark, mysteriously tense attempts to get to the root of problems with others and to find contentment within one’s self.

“Aurora” sounds just like a musical equivalent of that phenomenon, as Bjork’s voice and the music swell and recede together, building complex patterns around each other. She multi-tracks herself as the chorus here, wordlessly augmenting the wash of sound. “Frosti” is a repetitive rondelay, a swelling instrumental, icy and crystalline, a scale-climbing assent of arpeggios. It's both speedy and still, like multi-faceted crystal chimes.

“Heirloom” is a mystery, an acknowledgment of family as a source, rather than a hindrance, to creativity and health. It’s a fairytale, both dream and nightmare, filled with mysterious subconscious imagery that has to be felt rather than literally understood. “Harm of Will” and “Unison” are the epic closers to the album, and both make surprisingly effective use of choral voices (or “choirs” as Bjork calls them in the liner notes). Like soundtracks to old movies (Cocteau’s haunted “Beauty and the Beast,” and the 1930s fairy-dusted “Midsummer Night’s Dream” both come to mind), they build and elevate and sweep us along into Bjork’s timeless, fertile, ever more corrugated and ornately enveloping nest. The former is dreamy, meandering, ebbing and flowing as we’re pulled along. The latter is almost giddy, especially a drunken synth line that bounces through the choir, in counterpoint to Bjork’s darker, deeper vocals.

She’s not screaming this time, and she’s not whispering, either. She’s found a balance, a private poise that is welcoming rather than elusive. She’s home at last, and she’s invited us in.








Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: At Work