I think the universe has been secretly conspiring to make a Bjork fan out of me. I'm not exactly sure how it all started, but after thinking really hard about it, I can trace it all the way back to my menial college, job filing away CDs at a now-defunct Wherehouse store, when one evening I noticed Bjork's defiant but radiant headshot on the cover of Post, and thought, "Hmm, she's really pretty." That's not a very good reason to become a fan of a musician, though, and I didn't even know what type of music she made until I was first exposed to one of her songs in 2001, by way of the Australian hard rock band Beanbag who had covered "Army of Me". I really enjoyed their version of the song, so I checked out her original version, and found that I just couldn't get into the way that this Icelandic singer enunciated English words. That same year, she became the subject of much ridicule after wearing her infamous swan dress to the Academy Awards, and I just figured she was too weird for my tastes anyhow. So I promptly forgot about her for a few years. I had a brief flirtation with her in 2004 when her album Medulla came out - and I admitted to being fascinated at the concept of creating an entire album based on little more than the human voice... but still, not for me. Bjork seemed to have too many idiosyncrasies for me to work around.

Then she appeared on Saturday Night Live in 2007, a few weeks prior to the release of her new album Volta, and her performances - particularly the second song "Wanderlust" - had me enraptured. OK, I'll admit that part of it was because she was playfully sexy in an I'm-not-purposefully-showing-it-off sort of way in her silver dress, dancing around barefoot. But that song was also catchy as hell, and I admired the artistry in how it was put together, and it described my insatiable desire for exploration perfectly. My inner critic and my inner child actually came to a consensus on this one - I had to find out what else Bjork had up her sleeve. It was my first real exposure to a Bjork song that wasn't overtly difficult for an outsider to get into. And that started a chain reaction that's led me to take many trips (mostly satisfying ones) through Volta, and also go back and re-examine Medulla, and even check out 2001's chilly, intimate Vespertine for the first time. I almost never go back in time right away with an artist I've only just started listening to. Too much work. But what can I say - having finally gotten over her little vocal quirks and her odd enunciation of English, I've become enchanted with many of the little idiosyncrasies that used to scare me off.

Those older albums are meant to be discussed in other reviews that may or may not get written at a later date. Right now I'm going to focus on Volta, which has served as my "Bjork gateway drug". It appears to be a pretty good primer for the Bjork newbie - snarling, synthesized dance beat collide with horns and playful aggression on the album's faster tracks, while that same horn section and a few other choice instruments (some rather exotic) create lush and stately (if somewhat detached) ballads that actually comprise the bulk of the record. It's a good exercise in testing the waters of Bjork's bi-polar extremes. As much as the hype about Volta would lead you to believe that it's Bjork's return to making albums full of in-your-face, danceable singles (which is true for a few songs, in a rather unconventional manner), it's really the ballads that comprise a good two thirds of this 10-track record. That means dizzying peaks and somber valleys with some rather steep cliffs keeping the two apart - the flow of this album is frustrating to say the least, and there's no single mood that I'm ever in which makes me want to hear both types of songs crammed up against each other. I'd only really classify one song as being somewhere in between, and unfortunately, that song's not much of a standout.

But I'm a Bjork newbie still. Any gripes about musical style will probably soften with time as I grow more accustomed to her quirks. What brings me back for another trip through Volta's manic madness each time is largely the lyrics. I'll be truthful - I still don't like the way that a lot of these songs are sung, and it's not because of the enunciation, it's because Bjork has a tendency to just let fragments of melody float in the ether during many of her slower songs. It brings startling amounts of attention to the individual words, and despise how the melodies may fall flat, what I'm fortunate to find is a collection of interesting confessions about feeling detached and foreign, wandering around and looking for something but not knowing what it is, reaching out and grabbing at friends and family and others who you're supposed to love, and reminding yourself what caused you to feel that way about them in the first place now that you're so far removed from your origins. I can relate to some of those themes - until some seemingly unrelated theme like terrorism or political protest comes crashing in and spoiling my little attempt to sum the album up in one thematic paragraph. Bjork seems to take pride in being difficult like that at times. Hmmm... Maybe it's better if I just discuss each track individually and see what connects to its surroundings and what doesn't.

Earth Intruders
With our feet thumping
With our feet marching
Grinding skeptics into the soil...
Who else but Bjork would start off an album with a militant alien march declaring war on all of humanity? Not many artists would, that's for sure. But despite her best attempts to weird us all out with the primal percussion, her chanting and wailing about how her guerilla forces made up of mud and sticks and leaves are going to come cause all sorts of chaos and pillaging, and the pounding rhythms and crunked-up synthesizers provided by hip-hop producer Timbaland (who, surprisingly enough, is not a manufacturer of hiking boots), she can't seem to wipe the smile on her face as she sings this twisted anthem. That's what elevates a song that could have just been scary and off-putting to a higher plane, where shockingly enough, it's unconventionally catchy and totally single-worthy, yet without losing the unique stamp of personality that Bjork fans have likely come to expect. The way she sings the word "voodoo" is irresistibly cute - "Voo-OOO-OOO-OOO-doo!" There are a lot of guest players competing to be heard here, so the chaotic thickness of the mix might be the song's one drawback, but whatever, it's tons of fun and that's not something that can be guaranteed on every single Bjork album, so enjoy it.

Oh wait, I found a significant drawback. Darn. It's that pesky interlude between tracks one and two, where the song fades into the sounds of an icy harbor ripe with seagulls and a bunch of foghorns farting all over the place. I suppose it's meant to paint an aural picture of a journey that Bjork is about to embark on - she's bought a ticket to wherever a boat can take her that's far away from here. I get the intent, but still, nearly two minutes of this is a total momentum killer between two excellent songs.

Wanderlust
I feel at home whenever the unknown surrounds me
I receive its embrace aboard my floating house...
Here's the piece de resistance of this album, in my opinions. It starts out with just Bjork's voice, carefully enunciating soft lines about leaving a harbor and setting off on a seafaring voyage to anywhere not populated by the strict and unimaginative society she's leaving behind. She almost fools you into thinking that this song, with its warm horn fanfares, is going to be resemble of those frosty and painstakingly constructed ballads from Vespertine, but before you know it, some deep booty bass kicks in and an irresistibly danceable beat declares that this will not be a low-key ballad. This song is at once somber and celebrative, its joyous melody excitedly declaring her giddiness at the opportunity to wander to the four corners of the Earth and "peel off the layers until you get to the core", exploring every nook and cranny and taking copious photographs and so forth. But underneath it all, there's this nagging feeling that she can't get no satisfaction - no exotic locale will quite give her that sense of "home" that she's looking for, and yet the mere act of exploration, shared with someone she loves, makes them feel "united in movement". I know what that feels like - having an insatiable thirst for exploration that you can never quite quench, but discovering some unique things about the world and about yourself along the way makes it all worthwhile. Her enunciation of the word "wanderlust" sounds more like "wonderless", which is even more confusing when she later belts out the world "wonderful". But all ESL issues aside, this is definitely one of the most exciting songs I've heard all year, largely because of how much I identify with it. Bjork foregoes a traditional fadeout here, instead leaving us with the open-ended question "Can you spot a pattern?" as the horns blurt out a bit of Morse code, which then turns into the actual beeping of those dots and dashes, and finally we're left with nothing but the sound of ocean waves to take us into the next track. Exquisite.

The Dull Flame of Desire
Like lightning flashing in the sky
But there's a charm that is greater still
When my love's eyes are lowered
When all is fired by passion's kiss...
Speaking of momentum killers, I'm not sure that a slow, stately, horn-laden duet that runs for seven and a half minutes is the most logical way to keep the flow of an album going. I'd better get used to it - Bjork spends most of the album in slow mode, as I mentioned earlier, and she can accomplish some beautiful things in that mode if the listener keeps an open mind. This track is slowly winning me over - it seemed to drag on and on at first, with Bjork's (sometimes heavily layered) trading off verses with English singer Antony Hegarty, whose vocal also sound like he's over-enunciating a language that wasn't his first, even though it probably was. It's hard to describe, and honestly his approach strikes me as a bit cheesy at first, like he's over-emoting everything he sings. At the same time, his vibrato is kind of nice, and as he and Bjork intertwine with each other and the horns and drums get more intense while the song slowly unfolds, you can definitely get swept away in the current if you choose to. As for the lyrics, I'm not sure why the flame of desire is a "dull" one, but there may be a connection between the insatiable lust expressed in the previous song and the dull ache for human contact being expressed here. This track might be a bit too repetitive of its verses, but when it finally hits its payoff as Bjork's final cry of "Desire!" falls away and we're left with a thunderous, rushing drum beat, it's a euphoric moment. And then, all too suddenly...

Innocence
Fear of losing energy is draining
It locks up your chest, shuts down the heart
Miserly and stingy...
OOF! Timbaland is back in the producer's chair, immediately whacking us in the gut with an aural two-by-four - a rhythm that sounds like a dude getting punched followed by a devious music box ringing out a few notes, over and over again. It's a deviously catchy rhythm, accompanied by some odd, slightly scratchy squiggles of synthesizer. It gives Bjork a jerky, well-defined rhythm to show off her voice against, and her performance here is stellar - hitting the right high notes and somehow managing to sound streetwise at the same time. (She's nothing if not highly malleable.) The constant cry of rhythmic pain makes sense in the context of the lyrics - Bjork is singing about pain and fear, things that we shy away from out of a desire to keep our childhood innocence intact. She's acknowledging that she's allowed fear to blind her and hold her back, and it's actually this act of self-protection that's distanced her from her innocence. By embracing it and learn from it, she feels confident that she can feel free and guiltless again, just with the worldview of an older and wiser individual. There's a good balance of hard-earned wisdom and unbridled optimism here - she may sound like she's just being a masochistic, but I think it's really a celebration of the fact that all we truly have to fear is fear itself.

I See Who You Are
Let's celebrate now, all this flesh on our bones
Let me push you up against me tightly
And enjoy every bit of you...
A romantic and exotic ballad crops up here, introduced by the watery sounds of the pipa - a traditional Chinese instrument being played by Mix-Xiao Fen, who is apparently one of the best in the biz (though more contemporary in her approach to said instruments than some of her colleagues, from what I've gathered. I doubt very many hardcore traditionalists would feel comfortable working with Bjork anyway.) This track is like taking one of Vespertine's quietly sexy tone poems and transplanting it to the Far East, and I love everything about it except for the empty spaces in between, where the linking rhythm provided by the keyboards (or bells or whatever they are) drops out and Bjork's voice seems to not be tied down to any particular rhythm. Sigh. I need to stop expecting rhythmic consistency on a Bjork record, but on those faster songs, she's so good at solidly defining a rhythm that it's hard to say goodbye to that sensibility on the softer songs. Bjork's estrogen-dominated horn section brings in a lovely, Sigur Ros-styled crescendo at the end (it's more likely she who first influenced them, actually), eventually fading out into the sound of more rushing water, which segues into the album's second half rather nicely.

Vertebrae by Vertebrae
I have been filled with steam for months, for years
Same old cloud, claustrophobic in me...
Bjork really brings the creepy on this brooding track - the horns keep blurting out the same note six times in succession, getting a little louder over the course of it, like a scene from a horror movie where someone thinks they're being followed, and then they back off just as Bjork looks over her shoulder, only to sneak up on her again as she sings the next line of lyrics. The drums are doing some sort of a slow death march to make it that much more eerie, and yet I can't quite put my finger on the exact rhythm. This song is played very loosely, hanging on a note for several seconds at a time in between verses before resuming the slow chase through a dark alley. Bjork reminds us of her fascination with the human anatomy by singing abstract lyrics about the human backbone and about feeling like she's full of time (the strategically placed sound of hissing percussion shows up right around this point just to give the song a slightly "industrial" feel). It's incredibly creative, but because the rhythm is hard to follow and it keeps starting and stopping, there's not a lot about this song's melody that sticks in the brain. That one-note horn motif does, though, in a big way.

Pneumonia
All the stillborn love that could have happened
All the moments you should have embraced
All the moments you should have not locked up...
Even though we've been in a relatively slow mode for three tracks now, I do really find the initial transition of this track to be quite smooth and well thought-out, with the tension from the previous song cooling off and leading into a somber horn fugue. As achingly beautiful as it sounds at first, though, Bjork spends this entire song floating in the ether, with absolutely no rhythmic element to anchor her. This has the effect of making every single line of this heartfelt song seem very random, as if she's making up free-verse poetry on the spot. No matter how many times you listen, you're likely to have trouble following it, or caring about what's being sung. She sounds like she's weeping at the bed of a sick friend, perhaps someone who is tempted to ask her to pull the plug because they have no hope of ever recovering. Bjork will have none of that, and she tried to give her friend reasons to live. "To shut yourself up would be the hugest crime", she urges, and it's too bad that she seems to be grabbing each successive note out of thin air in a very irritating fashion, because I'm tempted to be malicious and remark that shutting her up might not be such a bad thing right now. It's OK, Bjork, once you get to the next song, I won't feel that way any more. But enough with the deeply depressed horn section - let's get on with it already!

Hope
What's the lesser of two evils?
If she kills them or dies in vain
Nature has fixed no limits on our hopes...
"Here's my version of it, eternal whirlwind", a pair of echoing Bjorks tells us in this song's slick intro. This is the last of the Timbaland tracks, and it's decidedly non-hip-hop in its rhythmic origins, but still slickly produced with tabla and some fast-fingered Latin guitar runs (or is it Greek? Middle Eastern?) I'm not sure) pushing the "exotic factor" off the charts. It's too bad, given this fascinating bed of percussion and melody, that Bjork has to decide once again to sing each line whenever she damn well pleases instead of following more of a well-defined rhythmic structure. It renders her moral quandary about whether it makes a difference if a female suicide bomber was pregnant or not into an aimless diatribe that's difficult to care about. And wait, WHAT? Why are we philosophizing about the implications of a woman blowing up her own baby in the name of political protest, anyway? Where did that question come from and what does it have to do anything else? (It may well have a lot to do with it; I'm just not seeing the connection, and the lazy vocal delivery makes me not want to care.)

Declare Independence
Damned colonists
Ignore their patronizing
Tear off their blindfold
Open their eyes...
Well, enough mellow philosophizing, it's time to strip the political protest stuff down its most instinctual and aggressive elements. After a brief intro which brings back those deep foghorns from near the beginning of the album (I wouldn't have minded if it was just 15 seconds or so of that, like it is here), Bjork begins to demand over obnoxiously scratchy (and yet strangely melodic) synthesized bass and guitar riffs, "Declare independence, don't let them do that to you!" And that's really the bulk of the song, aside from some spirited exhortations to "Make your own flag!" and "Go to the top of your highest mountain!" and so forth. Her delivery gets more and more intense as the song goes, bringing in a pounding, crunching rhythm that won't quit, and whipping itself into a total frenzy as Bjork shouts at the top of her lungs. This one isn't going to chance the minds of any non-fans who cite Bjork's voice as the reason they can't get into her, but I've actually come to love it quite a bit despite the repetition and the near-silliness of it all. It's the way that she works the harsh electronic elements and the horns and her raw voice into something that truly rocks despite not being played by a traditional rock band lineup at all that thrills me. You can dance to it furiously in a club, you can pump your fist to it while driving in the car... it's surprisingly accessible despite its brute-force approach. Supposedly this one's a tribute to Greenland and the Faeroe Islands, both overseas properties of Denmark, and I'll stay out of the political discussion on that one. All I can say is that if I were leading a political revolt, I'd be more than happy to adopt this song as my anthem.

My Juvenile
I truly say, you are my biggest love
I clumsily tried to free you from me
One last embrace, to tie a sacred ribbon...
Once "Declare Independence" abruptly cuts off, we suddenly drop back into the slow and rhythm-free side of Bjork's musical personality, with a well-intentioned song dedicated to her son that is largely sketched around the lovely musings of some sort of harp. I guess this is Bjork's "Motion Picture Soundtrack" moment (those who are into Radiohead will know what I mean), though it's not nearly as detached or crazy as that head-scratching piece. She's actually pretty straightforward, debating with herself about whether she's offered her boy the right amount of freedom as he grows old, whether she's held to loosely or too tightly. Antony Hegarty is back for another duet, but his presence seems unnecessary here, as he just gets sucked into the same "floating around aimlessly" trap that Bjork does. I can't get into the song at all despite really admiring the reason it was written. And that causes me to look for reasons to nitpick things like Bjork's enunciation - she means to say that to wherever her son is, "I send warmth", but it comes out sounding like, "I send worms". (Which is great if he's into fishing, I guess. Living in Iceland, I suppose it's a distinct possibility.)

That's pretty much it for the album - at least, for physical copies of it. Some digital downloads are apparently bundled with alternate mixes of up to three of the album's songs. "I See Who You Are" gets the biggest makeover, which isn't really that drastic of a change - they removed the pipa (boo!) and added a light, constant percussive rhythm throughout the whole thing (yay?) "Earth Intruders" and "Innocence" also appear in these alternate mixes - the former seems a little less crowded and simply fades out rather than going into that cumbersome foghorn interlude, while the latter seems virtually unchanged except that it lacks the musical segue into "I See Who You Are". I'm guessing these mixes are for radio single purposes. They really don't strike me as necessary and they add no value to the album.

I feel like there could have been more original content on this album - something to ease the transitions in and out of "Declare Independence" would have been helpful. Despite the disjointedness, though, I love something about pretty much every song on the album, save for "Pneumonia" and "My Juvenile", so it's still highly listenable once you get used to the aural oddities. The fact that I'm actually more drawn to Bjork's harsher and slightly more deranged side as shown on a few of these tracks bodes well for my first listen to Homogenic, which is coming up soon, but I'm also finding that all of the elements that I do enjoy about the ballads on this album have prepared me well for Vespertine. So while this likely isn't Bjork's best work, I'll definitely recommend it as a good entry point if you've been on the fringes for a while and haven't been sure whether to take the plunge and listen to one of her albums.

ALBUM WORTH:
Earth Intruders $1
Wanderlust $2
The Dull Flame of Desire $1
Innocence $1.50
I See Who You Are $1.50
Vertebrae by Vertebrae $.50
Pneumonia $0
Hope $.50
Declare Independence $1.50
My Juvenile $0
TOTAL: $10

Website: http://www.bjork.com

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Listening