Duraddict

BIOPHILIA

Listening to Björk albums is like falling in love with a best friend. The same things that you once loved about a person are the same things that begin to cause throbbing in your temples. The eccentric, playful approach to music this Icelandic disaster once employed has now found itself perverted by pretense and faux-prestige. Since 2004, B has been on a pretty steady decline musically, with Medulla dividing fans and then Volta alienating whoever was left. A supposed return to form was expected with this year’s Biophilia project, created in part on Apple’s iPad (which is nothing but an overpriced toy for adults). Upon hearing the album, I can only say that Björk is about to hit rock bottom. This is her first album to miss the Top 10 in the UK, and it hasn’t been getting the flawless reviews she’s been so accustomed to. It’s easy for critics to like her music for the same reason the mainstream gobbles up Adele—it makes people feel superior. Biophilia, though, is a lost expression of I’m-not-entirely-sure that adds up to a whole of screaming and random computer bleeps and bloops.

This other-wordly crap B’s been doing for nearly the entire decade needs to just stop. She’s becoming GaGa-esque in how badly she has lost herself. She’s not nearly as experimental or curious, rather complacent and seemingly bored with her own work. Biophilia takes the thoughtless lyrics from 2007 and combines them with the tuneless melodies of Drawing Restraint 9. Of the ten to thirteen songs on Biophilia, only a very humble slice thrills me the way her previous songs had. Gone is the attitude of Homogenic or the playfulness of Vespertine. Her domestic bliss has stagnated her process, and Björk has officially leveled off into mediocrity.

And seriously… since when can she not speak English? As of late, starting around the same time as the Volta promotion, she’s given interviews in a very thick Icelandic accent that is almost unintelligible, and her English is suddenly terrible—“Have I too often craving miracles?” Any Björk fan knows that this woman, who has been living in England since the 90s, is more than fluent in English and has given multiple interviews without misinterpreting anything. I’m not sure why she’s suddenly playing up to her foreign-ness. This crap is spread around this album from start to finish with lyrics that don’t add up to the most abstract of poetry. They're just words to kind of fit the random computer samples of harps and chimes she used to compose this album. Virus and Mutual Core bring back some of that classic Björk magic, but only Cosmogony, a song dedicated to the many theories of how life came to be, makes me tingle the way Isobel or Jòga previously did. It’s an experiment with brass that she tried many times back in 2007, but never quite got right.

Other than that, though, Biophilia is full of nothing but hacked-filler. It’s lazy, and there’s nothing memorable about it. I didn’t think she could get worse than Volta, but man I was wrong. It’s disappointing when an artist you love suddenly stops tickling your fancy. But this is the first album by B that I do not own and I do not plan to buy, and if it weren’t for Spotify, I wouldn’t even have been able to listen.

Moon
Thunderbolt
Crystalline
Cosmogony
Dark Matter
Hollow
Virus
Sacrifice
Mutual Core
Solstice

Download: Cosmogony
Trash: Everything else.

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