reviews

[r stanton <industrialrobot@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

New review for this week.  Other new ones include: Blaubac, Fennesz, and 
F.S. Blumm, all at www.students.uiuc.edu/~rstanton

Bjork
Vespertine
(Elektra/Warner)
[7.8]

    My second semester in college I had one of those creative writing 
teachers they always make movies about. You know, the off-the-wall one that 
throws chairs across rooms, curses profusely, gets his students 
rip-roaringly drunk at all the least appropriate times, and inevitably 
teaches them a series of great lessons, only about a quarter of which have 
anything to do with the art of writing creatively.
    All semester long, this teacher would pull me aside at the bar after 
class, buy me a drink, and tell me ?You know that assignment I gave to the 
class? You don?t have to do it. But I need you to do this?? His personal 
assignments to me were varied but many came in the form of a seemingly 
endless string of rewrites on this one damned piece, a scene from an 
inadvertent Crime and Punishment rip-off wherein the narrator finds a dead 
body at a train station and becomes physically ill. Week after week, he?d 
toast Virginia Woolf and assign me three more rewrites.
    For a while the piece got better with each subsequent rewrite, but by 
the twelfth go-round, I was merely switching back and forth between 
equally-well-crafted turns of phrase with each consecutive edit. By 
semester?s end, I couldn?t look at that scene without feeling sick. Worst of 
all, the piece never even got finished.
    The whole time, I assumed he was trying to tell me not to give up, that 
if I worked at the piece hard enough, it was bound to get good. I was wrong. 
He was trying to make a point: I could rewrite a piece as many times as I 
want, perfecting every line, perfectly shaping every last turn of phrase, 
but unless the material meant something to me, unless there was some 
passion, it would never cross that line that separates the good from the 
great. Sure, endless rewrites had made my prose sparkle, but I was writing 
stupid suspense stuff, when I should?ve been writing about something that 
mattered.
    The most recent release from Icelandic siren Björk Gudmundsdóttir 
suffers from all the same difficulties as my early attempts at writing. 
Taking into account nothing but sheer sonics, Vespertine towers mightily 
above Björk?s previous efforts. Never before have her densely orchestrated 
arrangements sounded so crisp and breathtaking, her vocals sounded so rich, 
her programmed beats baffled the mind so. Yet, for the first time in her 
career, it seems as though Björk is at a loss for something to say.
    Over the last few years, we?ve seen Björk move farther from the 
hard-dance backdrops of Debut with each effort. Homogenic saw her programmed 
beats grow up; more mature and subtle, but hardly boring. Last year?s 
Selmasongs EP saw her replace beats with found sound percussion; arranged 
samples of shoes squeaking on a recently glossed wood floor or machinery 
churning and cranking taking the place of synthesized drums. With 
Vespertine, Björk returns to good ol?-fashioned electronics, but she?s 
hardly recycling Homogenic beats. This is current sounding stuff. Vespertine 
is filled with chopped up clicks, spliced gurgles and sonic farts. Current 
IDM golden boys Matmos help out on a few tracks, as do a slew of other 
electronic artists, but it never sounds like this album was pasted together 
after the fact. Great care has been taken to make Vespertine stand together 
as a whole.
    Just like Homogenic, there are string-sections-a-plenty here, but this 
time they?re accompanied by a slew of harps and an army of music boxes that 
make for breathtaking backdrops for beats that unravel slowly, twisting and 
curling, exploring the outer ranges of Björk?s songs. These instruments 
bring an ethereal quality to songs like ?Frosti? and ?Aurora? that calls to 
mind fellow Icelandic musicians Mum, imbuing a sort of delicacy to the 
music. It?s fitting, as Vespertine is probably the most delicate collection 
of songs Björk has ever released. Yet, the songs collected here lack some of 
the passion that made equally calm songs like Debut?s ?Like Somebody in 
Love? or Selmasongs? ?Scatterheart? gripping in spite of their pace.
    It seems important to note that a weak song from Björk is hardly a bad 
song. Throw her in that group with Vladmir Nabokov and The Simpsons. Even 
her lesser work is worth your attention. Still, all the gorgeous production 
in the world cannot make a halfhearted song into, say, ?Human Behavior.? For 
all the time and effort that was put into its creation, Vespertine is an 
album that sinks far too easily into the background.
    Early on, I learned that all the care and attention in the world would 
not make my writing worth anyone?s attention unless I was writing about 
something that mattered. Listening to Vespertine, there isn?t a doubt in my 
mind that countless hours of work went into assembling the sounds present 
into something beautiful. Still, Björk?s music has always been imbued with 
that special ability to grab you by the collar and demand your attention. 
This is missing on Vespertine. I can only hope that by her next release, 
Björk will have recaptured the passion, which has always made her music so 
crucial.

David M. Pecoraro

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