The musician’s self-professed ‘Tinder album’ spins from ecstasy to frustration by focusing more on soundscapes than melody
At this stage in her career, no one expects Björk’s latest record to sound much like her last one. And yet it’s hard to avoid heaving a thankful sigh when Arisen My Senses, the opening track of her ninth studio album, Utopia, crashes into life: birdsong giving way to bright splashes of electronics, beatific-sounding harp chords and cascading beats not unlike the oft-sampled rhythm track of Schoolly D’s old rap classic PSK, What Does It Mean? It sounds positively ecstatic, which comes as a relief. Utopia’s predecessor, 2015’s Vulnicura, was a remarkable record, a latterday entry into the canon of legendary break-up albums. It attained its place alongside Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear and Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks by setting its fathomless misery to atonal string arrangements and abstract electronics that, during its central track, kept vanishing into a single flatlining beep. It was raw, brave, challenging, unique and all the other adjectives heaped on it in reviews, but with the best will in the world, any album so harrowing that the appearance of gloom-laden vocalist Anohni constitutes a moment of light relief is going to be one that defies you to listen to it repeatedly.
Related: Björk: Vulnicura review – a sucker punch of a breakup album
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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