A breakup album might seem straightforward by comparison, but it requires certain special skills.
I got bills to pay i got mouths to feed song series#
If you wanted evidence that Björk’s work had become even more rarefied since her mid-90s commercial heyday, then there it was, in the form of a series of iPad apps narrated by David Attenborough. It is, after all, the follow-up to Biophilia, an album in the grand pop tradition of songs about plate tectonics and human biorhythms.
Considering Björk’s recent career, there is something remarkably prosaic about her releasing a breakup album in the grand pop tradition of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear and Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, even one with a title that sounds like a cream you put on verrucas and a cover photo featuring the singer with what looks like a cross between a gaping wound and a vagina in the middle of her chest. The album details her separation from artist Matthew Barney so unflinchingly that the first six songs are subtitled with a sort of date-stamp: Five Months Before, Two Months After. That could be a description of Vulnicura itself. But it does contain what may be the album’s most telling line: “I am fine-tuning my soul,” sings Björk, “to the universal wavelength.” The lyrics aren’t the best on Vulnicura – after almost 40 minutes of starkly drawn emotional turmoil, there’s something jarring about her breaking out the kooky physics metaphors and inspirational poster-type slogans about dancing through the pain and learning by love to open up. It’s a kind of avant-garde I Will Survive. It is the moment when the mood of Björk’s ninth solo album finally shifts a little, from black despair to something close to battered optimism. S even tracks into Vulnicura comes a song called Atom Dance.
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