Seventeen years after The Sugarcubes released their shiny, mystifying debut single in Britain, there can be few people who have yet to make up their minds about Björk. If you haven’t succumbed to her gymnastic, idiosyncratic charms by now, it’s a little late to be converted.
Clearly, Björk understands this better than anyone. Hence her sixth album is more experimental, more insular, more incontestibly Björkian than ever. In comparison, 2001’s tender, intimate “Vespertine” sounds like a brash pop record, for “Medulla” is predicated almost entirely on her voice. Instruments, legend has it, originally adorned these 14 songs before Björk decided that they were entirely surplus to requirements. That, in fact, anything other than the human voice – admittedly treated beyond recognition at times – was somehow a vulgar imposition on these intense and lovely songs.
As a result, parts of “Medulla” resemble an exercise in conceptual manipulation, one where the means by which sounds are created have more emotional resonance than the sounds themselves (an idea shared with her live collaborators Matmos, who appear fleetingly here). But fortunately, the songs are almost as strong as those on “Vespertine”, and the euphoric “Who Is It?” even has the kind of strident hook that Björk favoured during her commercial heyday of the mid-‘90s.
“Where Is The Line” is pretty fulsome, too, as she grapples with a growling Mike Patton, the spluttering human beatbox Rahzel, and The Icelandic Choir – an ethereal, consoling presence throughout much of “Medulla”. For the most part, though, this engrossing album finds Björk curling further into the cocoon she established on “Vespertine”, where meditative hum and biological gurgle become more meaningful than language.
“Submarine” is remarkable, as she recruits Robert Wyatt for an upgrade of the transcendental sigh-music he patented on 1974’s “Rock Bottom”. And by the extraordinary “Ancestors”, words have completely evaporated, and Björk is exchanging sexualised grunts with a throat singer, Tagaq. Everything, you suspect, that people hate about Björk is multiplied a thousandfold here. But by the same measure, to her fans, “Medulla” is an intimate, ecstatic wonder.
