According to the accompanying press release, Björk’s seventh full-length album isn’t an album at all. Described as a “multi-media project”, Biophilia comprises five elements; 10-track album, documentary, live show, website and, the one that’s been getting all the attention, a highly stylised iPad app inviting you to play with the songs using your own two hands.
Even Björk herself has accepted that the last part of the suite is a “recipe for disaster”, but for a woman who appears to march exclusively to the beat of her own drum and scarcely knows what a three star review looks like, there really is nothing to lose.
While 2007’s Volta was an experiment in production-heavy avant-garde pop, on Biophilia, Björk’s magnificent pipes once again become the star of the show. In fact, when she soars to her first core-shaking howl on opening lullaby ‘Moon’, it feels like a triumphant homecoming. Strikingly sparse arrangements are tailor-made to enhance Björk’s metamorphosing intones, while her instruments of choice include a digitally-controlled pipe organ, a 24-woman Icelandic choir and a set of 30-foot tall aluminum pendulums. Remarkably, she sounds every bit as clear and emotive at 45 as she did at 27, and just as strange.
It seems almost impossible that after two decades in the public eye, Björk is still one of the most mysterious people in music. As well as being the Chinese dragon of the fashion world and the Medusa of the celebosphere, there’s still something about her that suggests a musical Cyclops.
Some of the tracks on Biophilia follow the form of blissful first single ‘Crystalline’, whirring along in Björk’s signature spook before a great, thumping electronic bass line propels the whole thing to breakbeat stomper status. Others, like the cinematic ‘Hollow’, and the plodding ‘Thunderbolt’ are full of adventure; in a parallel universe, Hitchcock cohort Bernard Hermann could have had a hand in ‘Dark Matter’.
Lyrically, Björk doesn’t stray far from the twin subjects of astronomy and maths, but for all her discussion of lunar cycles and plate tectonics, at no point does this record feel scientific.
Save dubstep production duo 16bit, there are no new collaborators on here, which also means that there’s nothing as catchy as 2007’s Timbaland-produced ‘Earth Intruders’ (and don’t even think of wishing for another ‘Venus As A Boy’…)
Still, Biophilia is unmistakably Björk, just not the wild, glossy Björk we’ve grown accustomed to. Her songs are every bit as possessed as before, and a million times more impetuous, but with this record, we’ve caught her in a totally unfamiliar mood. On Biophilia, she is soft, studious and peaceful. But don’t worry, she’s still howling.