Carnegie Hall, New York
Days after an exhibition of her work was critically panned, the singer rallied with an emotional concert that reaffirmed her prodigious gifts
Björk was never going to find it easy, you must imagine, to play her first concert of songs from her brokenhearted new album Vulnicura. The struggle of performing such naked and personal music before thousands of people got compounded earlier this week, though, when her disastrous “retrospective” at the Museum of Modern Art elicited the worst reviews of her career. In the space of a few days, the concert became not just a debut of new material, but a comeback effort.
The Icelandic singer put on a brave face as she took to the stage of Carnegie Hall this weekend – insofar as you could make her face out beneath the spiky headdress, designed by Maiko Takeda, that engulfed her whole skull. She played the first six songs from Vulnicura, which chronicle her breakup with the artist Matthew Barney, as a single set and with evident difficulty. She frequently turned away from the audience, and on the short song History of Touches she couldn’t sing the words at all, replacing the lyrics with her trademark ah-sih-mah-lay-kah-ah-ah Björkish. Yet as she settled into the new material Björk opened up, and reaffirmed that her gifts have not slipped away.
Related: Björk review – a strangely unambitious hotchpotch
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by Jason Farago via Electronic music | The Guardian
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