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Amazon.com
Bjoerk's main asset as a musician is her fearlessness. Since the end of The Sugarcubes and the pop-dance of Debut, she has released progressively more experimental records. But after well over a decade of going further and further out, Volta steps back. Make no mistake; this is Bjoerk, and so it's still fabulously weird. Like 2004's mesmerizing Medulla and the 2005 soundtrack for Drawing Restraint 9, the songs are blissfully peculiar, with narratives about love, offspring, aliens...you name it. Yet melodically and philosophically, Volta recycles more than it innovates; the driving pulse of "Declare Independence," for instance, reminds us of Homogenic's "Pluto," and the lead single "Earth Intruders" sounds like Post's "Army of Me" on steroids. And just as Medulla oriented itself around a certain instrument--the human voice--this one concentrates on horns.

Still, the transition between her early work and the avant-garde bender she's been on since Vespertine is pretty harrowing, and it's satisfying to hear Bjoerk revisit her more accessible self. Uber-producer Timbaland pitches in here and there, most successfully on "Innocence," which uses a fat, disjointed pulse to drive the euphoric vocals forward. Elsewhere, the hyperactive sitar sample on "I See Who You Are" provides texture for the song's theme of enjoying each other while there's still "flesh on our bones." And "Pneumonia" makes fantastic use of the horn section with a soft arrangement that compliments the song's lyrical melody.

So while it's a bit of a stall, Volta is a lovely pause. It reminds us how much we appreciate the laboratory of Bjoerk's imagination, but also how much we missed her back when she was just goofing around. -Matthew Cooke

Album Description
Bjork returns to her iconic, innovative and rhythmic roots with Volta. Featuring her own infamous beats and collaborations with Timbaland, Antony Hegarty, Brian Chippendale and an all-female Icelandic brass section, the end result is an explosion of beats and an amalgamtion of sound and visuals that give Volta a life of its own, like the world hasn't seen from Bjork in years.

Album Description
Bj"rk returns to her iconic, innovative and rhythmic roots in 2007 with Volta - her sixth studio album, and the first to feature the Icelandic artist's infamous beats since Vespertine. Volta was produced and written entirely by Bj"rk herself, featuring contributions and collaborations from the likes of Timbaland, Antony Hegarty (of Antony and The Johnsons), Brian Chippendale (from Lightning Bolt), and also includes appearances from an all female Icelandic brass section and Chinese pipa players. The end result is an explosion of beats, and an amalgamation of sound and visuals that give Volta a life of its own like the world hasn't seen from Bj"rk in years.Bj"rk will be launching her first world tour since 2003 to support Volta, beginning with a headlining performance at Coachella. Bj"rk has also confirmed various festival appearances throughout 2007 including Coachella, Glastonbury, Werchter and Roskilde. Bj"rk makes her triumphant return to radio in April with the first single, Earth Intruders (featuring a collaboration from Timbaland).

Album Details
Produced by Timbaland and featuring Two Duets with Antony (Antony and the Johnsons) and a Collaboration with Rhode Island's Lightning Bolt. Includes the Bonus Track "i See who You Are" (Mark Bell Mix).

Customer Reviews: Read 128 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

The Story of Bjork's Unstoppable Descent May 11, 2007
65 out of 110 found this review helpful

First off, this is not a good record. If anyone else had released it, it would have been dismissed as yet another Eurotrash experiment with a weird female vocalist at the helm.

If you're a Bjork fan reading this, please understand that everyone has their opinion of things. I am a huge Bjork fan myself, and actually consider "Selmasongs" to be the pinnacle of her creative genius. Recently however, I think shes being too creative for her own good (read - 'pretentiously creative'), and this shows.

Im sorry - no matter how you dissect this album, no one other than a diehard Bjork fan is going to like it, and thats a fact.

The main problem is Bjork's sudden fascination for "world instruments" and her renewed drive to make an eclectic, industrial sounding album. All these elements are too much for one album, and this is a classic case of both the sum and its parts being meandering blobs of confused nothingness. In fact, nothingness is probably what you'd get out of this CD, as it has no memorable verses or choruses.

OK, so maybe expecting basic verses and choruses are wrong (though she does have some pretty catchy numbers in her back-catalog). Still, the beats here sound 'forced' (Timbaland has been thoroughly wasted), and by Track 4 I was wishing she would have made another boring version of "Medulla" instead. That album wasn't great, but as an experiment it at least felt cohesive.

I find a lot of love and reviews for this album on this page that are obviously by Bjork fans. Perhaps they see something here that I don't. However, just in case you do decide to buy this, be prepared to be woefully disappointed. The tunes are non-existent, and you have random warblings over distorted instrumentation. This is not a good thing in this particular case.

The worst offender to me was the pointless drivel that is "Declare Independence" which sounds like it was recorded off a school playground and then put through a Nine Inch Nails mixer to sound "fierce". The results are close to what one can only call "underwhelming".

Thats the problem with this whole CD. It has this amazing sense of "WHY" about it, when you finish listening to it. At least Tori Amos, even when she gives us ten boring tracks, gives us thirteen stellar tracks - ON THE SAME RECORD (Case in point, her latest "American Doll Posse", which in my book is an instant masterpiece).

I hated "Volta". Does that make me an ex-Bjork fan? I don't know. I still love "Homogenic" and even parts of "Drawing Restraint". But I find this her most nonsensical and disjointed record, and I'm not just saying that. It looks like shes started being weird and "unusual" now just for kicks, not because thats a genuine part of her personality. The word that comes to mind is "Forced", but I would also say "artificial" and "soulless".

Two Stars. And thats one star for the cover, and one star for the glory that Bjork once was. This CD is not recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

She's good enough for me to round UP for May 8, 2007
49 out of 72 found this review helpful

I would probably rank this disc more of a 3.5 or 3.75 if I had my druthers, but I'll round her up to a 4, which seems almost a shame, since Bjork herself doesn't work in integers in the realms of category, genre or even dimension.

The cover and interior images are nice reminders that Bjork is clearly an artist whose ilk is beyond the simple definitions of pop sensibility. In fact, when it comes to her music, I tend to make more connections to contemporary composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Alfred Schnittke rather than pop, dance and techno stars. Bjork has often worked in the realm of dissonance, making her voice jar against the music and push all of it into its own kind of instrumentation.

But even when working in the realm of dissonance, Bjork at her best moments takes disparate sounds and creates with them a complexity of emotion. Songs like "The Anchor Song" or "Hyperballad" work together a web of sound that makes them beautiful and sad and maybe even a little bit scary. Even in songs that seem almost too simplistic, Bjork works her voice more in the realm of instrumentation than conveying content.

In fact, the images on the packaging of this album seem to suggest an almost Dada-ist sensibility, and tracks like "Earth Intruders" and "Declare Independence" seem to use a cacophany of sound rather than organized patterns, which are usually the norm in electronic music. Bjork gets all-time credit for bringing electronic music back into the world of the avant garde (to nudge out some of the mass of horn-blowers and guitar-screechers), but a few of the tracks on this release don't ultimately satisfy in the end. In a way, there is a little too much clashing of rhythms in the style of Philip Glass than the overriding pathos of Alfred Schnittke. There are moments of interest in "Earth Intruders" and some niceties to "Wanderlust," but the first really sound track on this disc was "Innocence," which mixes an almost primal pounding with exquisite Bjork vocal. Bjork scores again with "Vertebrae By Vertebrae," but it seems that she has often been at her best when her attention is anatomical.

Bjork's willingness to experiment and get quite extreme in her explorations of the possibility of the electronic always garner my highest respect, though I wouldn't call this disc one of her finest efforts. No doubt, there are many lifetime acheivement awards waiting for her when her canon reconstructs the ozone layer (and let's hope she wears that awesome swan gown when she accepts), and so the acheivements of each individual album are but individual, thin wafers of a delicious whole, but _Volta_ doesn't strike the kind of pure inspiration and wholeness of vision as _Debut_ or _Vespertine_.

But give an exquisite artist her due--even the great poets know that writing a great poem is like standing in a field and waiting to get hit by lightning. Bjork stretches herself with each new song, and so she gets bumped up to a 4 with a more-than-3 release.

2 out of 5 stars

No new ideas, and very little music. June 12, 2007
26 out of 49 found this review helpful

The lyrics to "The Dull Flame Of Desire," the third song on Bjork's latest album, were originally written by the 19th-century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Unintentionally, this song reveals everything that's wrong with Bjork as an artist -- she got the idea to adapt Tyutchev, not from any interest in Russian poetry, but from watching Andrei Tarkovsky's art-house film "Stalker," where the poem is quoted. In other words, her affectations of high art are filtered through the dilettantism of a college undergraduate. She comes across a quote from Tyutchev in a critically approved, famously ponderous film by a critically approved, famously intellectual director, and that's it, she thinks she understands Tyutchev enough to interpret him.

Like every undergraduate dilettante, Bjork mixes her affectations of high art with annoying cutesiness, vulgarity, cheap pathos, platitudes, and other forms of bad writing and bad taste. That's deep, you see -- you can put high art next to low art, which is original and ironic, but it's also deep because it shows that like, low art is the same as high art and stuff. Thus Tyutchev's poem is preceded by "Earth Intruders," which is about space invaders and features such lyrics as "Metallic carnage! Ferocity! Feel the speed!" and followed by "Innocence," which consists of one really harsh, clanging beat and not much else.

The phrase "not much else" can really be applied to every song on the album. The reviewer who cited the "nothingness" of the album hit it dead-on. Bjork has always had this problem -- her songs often made the impression of music without actually having a lot of memorable music. But here there's not even much of an impression. In "The Dull Flame Of Desire," the strings just sort of sit in the background, playing very basic notes, and often sounding just like some ambient background noise. Bjork's moving tale of "Wanderlust" starts with some grand-sounding horns, but they are shortly relegated to blowing very simple notes in the background. And these two songs together take up fifteen minutes. "My Juvenile" is one of the better songs on the album, and there too the music consists of solitary piano notes in between Bjork's lines. There are no musical leads, no melodies, no development, no real rhythms even. The music consists of the most basic textures.

Granted, most of these textures are listenable, but all of them are immediately forgettable. And she's already done this stuff before -- the harsh sound in "Earth Intruders" recalls "Army Of Me," the delicate harps in "I See Who You Are" recall "Cover Me," the wacky cover art recalls the cover of Post, and so on. I guess if Medulla was kind of like Homogenic II, a serious album about nature and emotions, then Volta is more like Post II, an attempt to make a more quirky and fun album with diverse instrumentation. But the returns are diminishing fast.

Aside from "Earth Intruders," which is the most fully realized song on the album, none of the songs has any kind of vocal hook. Bjork's lyrics have no rhythm, no rhyme, no meter. She doesn't even bother to fit them into the beat anymore, where there even is a beat. And even when the lyrics are given to her with a very strict, formal meter (the Tyutchev poem), she pays little attention to that structure, and draws out the words, one syllable at a time, in exactly the same way in every song. The entire midsection of the album sounds very self-similar, because her delivery in "The Dull Flame Of Desire," "I See Who You Are," "Vertebrae By Vertebrae," and "Pneumonia" is more or less the same, and it's also the same as her delivery in her earlier slow songs like "All Neon Like." She's been doing this ever since Homogenic, if not since Debut, but now her music is so basic that there's just nothing to catch hold of.

Most of her writing is empty of content, and it's at its emptiest when she actually tries to make a statement about something. Take a look at "Hope." Bjork has apparently been hanging out with MIA a little too much, and this has led her to write a song about suicide bombers. Her analysis: "What's the lesser of two evils? If a suicide bomber made to look pregnant manages to kill her target or not?.. If she kills them or dies in vain?" And then, having posed this question, she coyly fails to provide any relevant answer, aside from a thoroughly meaningless platitude about how "nature has fixed no limits on our hopes"! Get it? She's leaving the answer open to you, the listener! Oh man, it's so thought-provoking to take the absolute easiest possible way out of a moral question.

But never fear, she recoups with "Declare Independence." Now, instead of dodging her own questions, she urges you to action: "Declare independence! Don't let them do that to you! Protect your language! Make your own flag!" Very strange, coming from a cosmopolitan pop star. I take it we'll be seeing her at the next convention of the Scottish National Party? It can't be that she's just saying that without any conviction, can it?

Bjork is famous as an artist, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the best things about her were her pop and dance inclinations. Debut isn't a musical masterpiece any more than Volta is, but it does have danceable beats, fun pop choruses, and an infectious sense of youthful energy, all of which are missing from Volta. Post suffers from many of the same problems as Volta, but it has a sensual production and a few strong pop hooks. Homogenic has fine singles. Volta has absolutely nothing that makes it stand out, other than being Bjork's worst album to date.

2 out of 5 stars

Once a fine musician and artist, now Bjork is an "artist." June 26, 2007
18 out of 33 found this review helpful

Even more than the ugly and unlistenable Medulla, Volta is full of deliberate musical meaningless. That is the point. Get it? If you aspire to being "in the know," you are supposed to find the "meaning" in this meaningless mess. Then you will be one of the bleeding edge intellectuals, and to give Volta five stars actually proves how "in the know" you are. But if you actually love music-as-music, it is obvious that Volta contains just two or three exceptions to the pretense of the rest of the mess. To my mind, the exceptions neither justify the expense or overcome the pointless ugliness of the rest.

Bjork was--and may still be hiding--a fine musician, when music is defined as sounds and silences constructed in a way that speaks first to human emotions rather than intellect. She used to allow her loves and hates, desires and fears and aspirations to transmit through her music, from Debut to Vespertine, to her audience, to me.

Now Bjork has apparently tired of so obvious but meaningful a practice as making emotionally meaningful music. She has become an "artist." Unfortunately, like so much contemporary "art," Bjork's new noise is intent on deconstruction of the musical forms that have served humanity for centuries (and will continue to serve us in the future). Rich and insulated, Bjork no longer needs or wants to speak to the rest of us who remain indifferent to the nihilistic fad of artistic deconstruction. I wish her farewell.

3 out of 5 stars

Eh, it was OK. May 9, 2007
15 out of 20 found this review helpful

Maybe I'm just too hung up on POST, but nothing seems to compare to me like that album. Don't get me wrong, it's a good disc, I'm just not as impressed as with her former efforts. I would though share it with a friend. It's a good album to just play and let run while you're doing something else...like vacuming your car or something.

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