Bjrok's Vulnicura Was A Brutal And Daunting Experience. It's Her Best Album In A Generation
The explicitly personal document of heartbreak revealed Bjork at her most vulnerable, and most intimidating
Tristan Young @talltristan
Few figures in modern pop have been as fragrantly and unapologetically inscrutable as Bjork. Over the course of her decades long career full of metamorphosis the Icelandic pop star had envisioned herself as a continuingly evolving project and persona, one that is ensconced in esoteric aesthetics and at times alienating textures. From the coquettish pixie of her early years to neophyte AI provocateur to the highly memeable sartorial styles in the vein of a swan dress, to pissing off one of the most authoritarian nations in the world at the worst (best?) possible time, Bjork’s public life has been a labyrinthine and convoluted journey. We have seen her depicted as vessel for pure innocence, a cyberpunk dystopian interloper, whatever was going on in the cover of Volta, and so many other things that are perhaps too abstract to allow us to easily view her simply as a person, one with the same hopes and fears and vulnerabilities as the rest of us. “I have emotional needs”, she assures us in Vulnicura, an album that operates somewhere between commanding and begging the listener to understand that Bjork is as wounded, fallible, and in need of support as we all are. Far from an otherworldly or extra sensory like perception of the human sprit and its attendant psychosomatic manifestations, all of this is just as hard and confusing for her as it is for everyone else. Be it her wavering health, her family, or most saliently the end of a defining relationship. With Vulnicura Bjork invited us deeper into her psyche than ever just as she was excavating its darkest reaches for the first time. She did so gambling on the hope that there was something in there to provide respite from the raw and explicit power that defines the human condition like no other- heartbreak. The experience is as illuminating as any project she’s ever attempted.
Bjork’s artistic trajectory can be mapped and compartmentalized along roughly three different epochs dating back to her first album Debut. Her earliest releases dealt in the dazzling wonderment of the human experience, refining emotional stimulus into superlatives, be them fulfilling or precipitous. Her ideas were rendered with a slick veneer that captured the sensation of feeling, often from the perspective of a being flummoxed by the idea of the human condition, but no less curious. In her mid career turn starting with Medulla Bjork’s observational lens expanded outward vastly, less concerned with the delightful contrasts of human feeling and more focused on macro concepts. Bjork cast her self as the avatar of mother nature in Medulla, as the nation state in Volta, even as the cosmos itself in Biophilia. Now in her modern iteration, Bjork has gone in the opposite direction, exploring instead a vast and expansive world that exists in an insular microcosm. “I am bored with your apocalyptic obsessions”, she signals in the song Black Lake, confirming she is done with such large-scale phenomena. Now she has returned to human form, this time to burrow deep into a universe of vivid experience so vast despite existing between the permeable and interstitial boundaries of our most complex and interminable emotions. She drills deep into the nucleus of her own humanity, no longer keen to be delighted by mere idiosyncrasies, but to chart her core and show that this world is larger and more challenging than any physical universe. Vulnicura is a triumph of that ambition, and an ideal case study to affix this now found thematic adventurism to: breaking up with someone.
Vulnicura, released in 2015, details the dissolution of Bjork’s relationship with her long time partner Mathew Barney, with whom she has a daughter. It was this contentious and traumatic experience that compelled her to record an album that was designed to elaborate on a singular and personal event- however she did not do it alone. Early on in the writing process she recruited recording artist and producer Arca into the fold. In efforts to write and produce every album differently, Arca would prove integral in achieving a balance and symmetry between the string arrangements that Bjork was gravitating towards and the disorienting anxiety of more glitched out electronica to capture her emotional state. Bjork gave little direction to Arca; instead once Arca was up to speed on the project she became more of a collaborative artist, with her often writing main sequences of the melodies in several songs. The only real defined criteria was to avoid a 4/4 house club kind of vibe and strive towards a more cinematic and narrative style. Arca helped accelerate this beat making process substantially.
To engineer and mix the album Bjork also brought Bobby Krlic on board. Better known by his stage name The Haxon Cloak, the enigmatic producer had made a name for himself with his eerie and cerebral music. Rather than simply being instructed to make the tracks sound as good as possible as is often the vague extent to which engineers receive guidance, Bjork brought Krlic on board specifically to lean in to those deathly and moribund proclivities. She wanted the nascent darkness in the album to be more sharply defined and accentuated, and who better to attempt this than The Haxon Cloak. Over a period of time beginning in 2013 the album was written and recorded back and forth in New York and Iceland. As the album was more or less complete in 2015 the project was actually leaked fully on the Internet. Bjork had in recent years become known for pairing her albums with an appendix of supplemental content, be they corresponding art exhibits or Ipad apps. Because of the unexpected leak, Vulnicura would have to stand alone. From a certain perspective this turn of fortune was rather serendipitous considering the estranged and lonely subject matter.
For much of the album Bjork subjects herself to the nadir of her emotional well being, and attempts the dual task of capturing the totality and severity of such contexts while also making it universally relatable. She takes the feelings of remorse and regret that are synonymous with the end of a long term relationship, the kind of feelings that we force into introversion and submission due to the pain or embarrassment of it all, and imbues them with the ornate drama and theatricality that maybe they deserve. Rather than indulging in the artifice of performative showboating, she renders these feelings and fears in terms of affecting grandeur or fierce intensity. Bjork does not relegate these fears to being written off as the mere frivolous or superficial insecurities we train ourselves to deride them as in order to move on. Instead she empowers these feelings with intense stakes, even severe ones at times. Those stakes are strikingly paramount throughout Vulnicura, such as the incisive horror of Notget with its menacing drums. Elsewhere the daunting Inception style blares of Mouth Mantra give way to a breakdown in its coding as if infected by a virus. In the later she speaks of events that are quite literally scaring. The impenetrable depths of depression and rejection in the morose and heavy Lionsong give all the neurotic inklings that a relationship is on the brink of demise an intense gravity. In Black Lake the absence of a love that was once foundational is codified briefly into an unnerving fierceness in the form of erupting and volatile percussive spasms. History Of Touches recalls a chilling and expansive ocean; it’s vastness accentuated by the sullen quiet and emptiness of it all.
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Among these anguished entreaties Bjork brings high calibre sophistication to the process. Vulnicura is brimming with lush and ornate string arrangements that give the album a deeply cinematic, if sombre vibe. The opening track Stonemilker has contemplative and meticulous arrangements that imagine a sprawling kind of narration. Lionsong has occasional tonal shifts from gorgeously laboured stings to quixotic melodic flourishes that intimate a low key noir thriller. The erratic and slightly errant stings of Family that crop up near the end scatter like some kind of dementia has taken them, vividly cementing the idea of how destabilising trauma can be. They are then contrasted with calming and sedate notational pulses that offer the most prolonged and cathartic moment of respite in the album. It’s here that Bjork offers, “we can get healed by it, it will relieve us from pain”, suggesting that such deep and painful introspection can ultimately yield positive results. You need those moral boosters every now and then with Vulnicura, especially leading up to the serrated strings of Notget that are near tortuous in their sonic design, yet oddly hypnotic in implementation.
It should come as little surprise considering the team Bjork cultivated in making it, that Vulnicura is also a riveting foray into modern progressive electronica. It gives the album several kinetic jolts, especially towards the surprisingly defiant and uplifting closers Mouth Mantra and Quicksand. The feral and industrial deconstructionism of the former carries the aberrant technical markers of Arca with aplomb. The later is a blissful, if messy thicket of distortions that begin to synchronize with the more pristine arrangements to the point where it seems gloriously harmonious. The agitated pulse programed into the low end of Notget is understandably overshadowed by the towering violins and Bjork’s harrowing vocals, but they add an interesting granularity to the sequence. Towards the end of Lionsong an entropic gauntlet of drum loops and sequencer shuffles shakes the song from its regal confines. Most of the digital contributions to Vulnicura are more subtle and ingrained into the structural lattice of the melodies, but the more explicit moments can be rather invigorating.
One of the thematic pillars of Vulnicura is exploring how one approaches and interprets emotions that are equal parts raw and encompassing. Bjork suggests in sound and lyrics that to a certain extent you can’t. While there is power in being aware of and acknowledging them, many of these feelings are just too insurmountable to fully contemplate and dissect. She articulates this through drawn out and laborious sounds to make a single emotion and moment in time stretch out to monumental and unapproachable scales. In designing her sound scape as such she, in an almost antithetical sense, gives voice to those indescribable feelings by making them so mammoth and incomprehensible, but in a more obvious way beyond our own introverted malaise. As if to give credence to aphorisms like I can’t put it into words or it’s too hard to describe, she validates these wounded claims by saying look at it, of course it is. In Family she wonders “how will I sing us out of this sorrow”. Earlier on in Lionsong she admits, “these abstract and complex feelings/ I just don’t know how to handle them”. Lines like these that are refreshingly straightforward and prosaic are peppered throughout the album.
Such lines provide a necessary commentary on the instrumentation that captures these exhausted sentiments in ways that are anything but straightforward. The claustrophobic and traumatic vectors of Notget scream this is the real deal- the death of a relationship, death incarnate. Death is all over this song; its language is vampiric, “for in love we are immortal, eternal/safe from death”, with a sound that is just as gothic. Mouth Mantra distorts everything into a perfect, terrifying synthesis of elaborate luxury and boundless, malignant growths. Tingling, not quite identifiable dread ripples through and permeates the notes and Bjork’s quivering voice convincingly in Lionsong. This vexing obfuscation extends to more positive moments on the album as well, such as the hints of hope and optimism that you can’t quite put your finger on beyond the enthusiastic inertia of Quicksand, and it’s supplicant background vocals. The daunting and transformative journey of Family ultimately ends on a note of sublime contentment that forgoes the need to understand how exactly you arrived at the point. Bjork guides you as far to that point of understanding as she can take you or herself, but getting that far becomes more and more satisfying the deeper into the album you get.
Such exacerbating emotional pummelling, especially in intentionally hard to decipher terms, may imply an overly melodramatic affair, but that’s far from the case. Melodrama, in its traditional forms, is ensconced in saccharine layers, whereas there is nothing cringey or sweet about Vulnicura. Furthermore, melodrama is mostly performative and hyperbolic with little actual introspection yet here Bjork is downright interrogative of her own internal condition. Melodrama demands that a person’s output, or specifically outrage, match the wavelength of a grandiose situation, but Bjork often does not center herself in design or lyrics. She will often let the instrumentation, even in its ambient curiosities, take center stage, such as the somnolent ending of Family. Later on she cedes the stage to the deleterious fury of Mouth Mantra. She also takes time to address the feelings and needs of her partner, even if they have parted on what seems like hostile terms in Lionsong. “Vietnam vet comes home after the war”, Bjork sings of her ex, alluding to the idea that she is not the only one that has demons she is struggling to master. Melodrama requires cut and dry binaries of emotion that would get too tangled were you to go deeper beyond their ostensible surfaces, but that’s entirely where Vulnicura operates.
Björkm, June 2015 (C Flanigan/WireImage)
Bjork out-manoeuvres the comparatively remedial sensibilities of melodrama by largely rejecting the language of romance in describing her heartbreak. Either because doing so would just be too traumatic for her or she’s simply not interested in doing so, she short circuits romantic lexicon and instead documents her experiences in more mathematic and data oriented terms. The physical language and biology of heartbreak, even. She details the end of her relationship like points on a spread sheet, affixing dates and times before or after the break up to most songs in the liner notes. One should not infer that this makes it a dull or heartless affair, but that cataloguing her experience in a more observational and academic sense is a vital compendium to being overwhelmed by the enormity of less describable emotions. In Stonemilker she speaks of reconciliation in terms of, “finding our mutual coordinates”. In the same song she mentions an emotional wound having coagulated- healing in a physical sense. During History Of Touches, the point in the album where she is pretty much consigning herself to defeat, she looks back on all of their shared physical moments in anodyne and calculating language, “every single archive compressed into a second”. Despite the clinical phrasing, you can sense so acutely how much this hurts for her.
She affixes these feelings to specific organs in the body in hopes of transubstantiating her pain into something that can be physically treated. “Our love was a my womb”, she says in Black Lake, which serves as a double entendre referencing the birth of their daughter as the defining aspect of their relationship, but also alluding to the clearly vaginal wound in Bjork’s chest on the album cover. She goes on to condemn her former lover, “you betrayed your own heart, corrupted that organ”. The heart, in this case is not a symbol of romantic acumen but a literal thing. Bjork sings of physical damage to her throat in Mouth Mantra and the idea of healing at a molecular level in Atom Dance, but it’s in Notget that these sentiments rise to their apotheosis. Bjork, writhing in agony the whole time shrieks, “we carry the same wound but have different cures/ similar injuries but opposite remedies”. It’s here that the manifestation of emotional turmoil as a physical wound is at its most prominent and serves as Bjork’s most vital pathway for exploring her own heartbreak. It provides an entomological explanation for her choice in naming the album Vulnicura, which is Latin for cure for wounds.
When she does however, wish to register her plight in terms of pure emotional spectacle, it’s appropriately grandiose and sweeping. She takes the aforementioned unspeakable cores of her current feelings and illustrates them with tectonic power to compliment the more cerebral obfuscations she is navigating. The idea is we may not be able to understand it all in specific terms but we can certainly be awe of its enormity and force. The nerve-racking destabilization of Mouth Mantra and the piercing force of Notget aptly convey that power. In less hostile terms the sweeping and curative grandeur of contributing vocalist Anhoni in the track Atom Dance is remarkable. Her ethereal voice is a wellspring of relief and hope, especially in conjunction with Bjork’s. They make that sense of hope seem like a life preserver in an ocean of malcontent. The otherworldly serenity of Lionsong suggests a spectrum of possibility in both optimistic and nervous terms. Bjork’s towering vocals that slowly melt away into a haze of subtle tones in Family is profoundly cathartic. It’s a wonderful contrast to the album’s litany of darker moments of equal temerity.
This sense of scale is anchored by Bjork’s haunted and mournful voice, one that takes the death of a relationship to more literal extremes than is perhaps healthy at times. She sounds wounded and full and of animus in Black Lake, methodically but scornfully deriding her ex with each glacial verse. This is a far cry from just the pervious song History Of Touches where she dotingly eulogizes a relationship on the precipice of ending. She caries a slightly detuned trauma in her vocal inflection in Lionsong, betraying her lack of steeled resolve as she sings, “maybe he will come out of this/ maybe he won’t/somehow I’m not bothered either way”. She laments not just the end of a relationship but reels at the deconstruction of her family, as she understood it in the eponymous song. Bjork seems sullen and consigned to a new life of ambiguity to suppliant one that was previously defined by fulfillment. The expert audio design and mixing in Mouth Mantra depicts her throwing her voice in different directions capturing the chaos and delirium of such a riotous moment in the album. Bjork radiates warmth in Atom Dance but in way that seems purposefully dulled of its former iridescence- like a flame that has been exhausted.
There are still the occasional bouts of intrepid curiosity or peculiarity in Bjork’s vocal dramatics and instrumentals, but we are long since passed the days of her earlier albums where they were to be expected in abundant supply. The quirky synth warbles in History Of Touches add a layer of intrigue, as do the florid gusts of zigzagging sequencers in Lionsong. There are bubbling percussive beats that try to rise to the surface in Black Lake although never quite fully, as if to imply that the process of healing is an inexorably mysterious and challenging one with no clear markers of success. Mouth Mantra, despite its explicit animus alludes to classic DJ scratch culture that Bjork has long been enamoured with amidst its more vicious glitching. Speaking of her more historical interests, just as she sings in typical Bjork fashion of scaling peaks and achieving clarity in Lionsong, the beat shifts to something curious and eccentric. In a more thematic sense Quicksand, perhaps for the first time on the album, has her vocals not pushing up against the melody but being carried along in its current. This affords her a touch more breeziness in her delivery than elsewhere and it’s well placed at the end of the album. Of course by this point she is no longer completely preoccupied by her own heartbreak.
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It’s interesting in that for all of the thematic and rhetorical thoroughness of the first half of the album, she flirts with supplemental or even straight up different subject matter towards the end. Notget is the most horror-core and deathly serious track in the collection not because of the trauma of loosing her partner, but because of the fear of the effect it will have on her daughter. Her maternal instincts kick in to ferocious extremes. “Now we are the guardians/ we’ll keep her safe from death”, she commands to her estranged lover, gesturing that their only meaningful bond now exists through their child. Mouth Mantra tears through even more incongruous tangents, focusing on throat surgery required to save her voice that temporarily prevented her from using it. It’s fitting that the song most draped in decay and demise would accompany her terror of losing her most valuable and innate gift- her vocals. “I was separated from what I can do/ what I’m capable of ”, she bellows with opprobrium. The music backs up this ethos with sundering, scorched and acidic distortions. It’s an unmistakably scared soundscape, once again relating to the biological subtext that runs through the whole album.
With the final track Quicksand, Bjork takes these seemingly thematically incompatible sojourns and ties them all together with impressive lyrical finesse. Being the most outward looking track of the album, Bjork contemplates the generational legacies of the women that came before her- her mother- and those that will come after her- her daughter and other aspiring artists. Where and how does she fit into that legacy? What has she contributed to it? How can her experiences in Vulnicura relate to the health and longevity of this legacy? “Our mother’s philosophy, it feels like quicksand/ and if she sinks I’m going down with her”, she sings, implying a staunch solidarity with not just her mother but all women who have endured everything form heartbreak to being unduly silenced. The unmitigated optimism of the phrase, “when I’m broken I am whole/ when I’m whole I am broken”, can perhaps be explained by the links she feels towards other women. In the absence of a devoted partner her emotional state is possibly now conditional on those around her. Her own trauma does not need to be the only thing to define her anymore, and her own health does not ensure that of other women. While not the flashiest of lines in Quicksand, what may be the most important verse- one that ties the whole album together- is when Bjork offers, “locate her black lake, the steam from this pit/ will form a cloud for her to live on”. Looking back to Black Lake, at the deepest point of her despair, she re-litigates the idea of the dark void of water as potentially a place for growth and healing. Later she wonders in Atom Dance, “maybe love is the ocean we crave”.
It’s a confoundingly non-linear way to arrive at some kind of conclusion as to what healing feels like and how you find it, but we should expect nothing less of Bjork. Far from making it simple for us or even herself, Vulnicura is a tesseract, a Mobius strip of navigating the most challenging and multiplex emotions. In it she reveals that terror, grandeur, confusion, healing, and observation in all of their forms cannot paint a full picture of those emotions, but together they can perhaps reveal the shape. This is the closest to that clear picture we may ever get, but no matter what generational iteration she occupies it’s clarity that Bjork is always chasing. “I refuse, it’s a sign of maturity”, she defiantly states in Lionsong, “to be stuck in complexity, I demand all clarity”. This process is messy and even debilitating, the kind of thing that no one in their right mind would reasonably want to attempt. And yet in Stonemilker she insists, “I better document this”. Bjork’s mind always did work a little differently.