Bjork Post Poll

Back in the day I would have said "Enjoy" or "Hyper-Ballad". Time and perspective make me say "Isobel".

"Army of Me", great lyrics, crazy video

Enjoy.

such a great record. this requires some thinking.

heh poll prompted by listening to Isobel, and realizing I may like it as much as Enjoy and H-B, which are my traditional favs.

attn jaymc: I wrote a paper on Hyper-Ballad from Mr Abney's class.

Impulsively voted for "The Modern Things."

hyper-ballad or enjoy. need time.

this is the biggest "grower" bjork record

i'm always pulling it out for different songs

I almost never listen to this one, but I'm usually greatful when someone else is playing it in their car.

"Army of Me" for Tank Girl, one of the best comic book movies ever!

army of me comes to mind first, good use of john bonham but sounds so '90s. hmm.

Debut was a better album than this though.

correct. but this explores a lot of different stuff and the sparseness/string work is really nice.

i love the thick 90s thing on army of me

Debut was a better album than this though.

I strenuously disagree. Overall, this is my favorite album of hers even though I never, ever, ever play "Army of Me" when I listen to it.

i never really feel like listening to this album in full but having individual songs popping up randomly on shuffle is always great.

It's between "Headphones", "The Modern Things" and "Enjoy" for me.

i know, i've actually had headphones in my head recently. and i haven't even listened to it. that says something about a song.

"Hyper-Ballad" (Björk/Nellee Hooper/Marius De Vries) – 5:21
"The Modern Things" (Björk/Graham Massey) – 4:10
"It's Oh So Quiet" (Hans Lang/Bert Reisfeld) – 3:38
"Enjoy" (Björk/Tricky) – 3:56
"Isobel" (Björk/Nellee Hooper/Marius de Vries/Sjón) – 5:47
"Possibly Maybe" (Björk/Nellee Hooper/Marius de Vries) – 5:06
"I Miss You" (Björk/Howie B) – 4:03

It is astonishing that all of these fantastic, amazing, best-of-career songs are all on the same album in almost-unbroken succession.

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This song should be renamed "aamy ummy"

I'm with Dan on this being better than Debut, but my Debut-hate has been well documented on other Björk threads.

it's still my fav bjork. is it a favorite or not-that-into-it kind of album? sorry this is about post

*debut is still my fav, that is.

I don't hate Debut but I do think Post is rather ambiguously a level above it both in quality and consistency; there are only two songs on Debut that I think are in the same league as the ones I listed from Post ("Big Time Sensuality" and "Violently Happy").

Yes, those two songs (+"Venus as a Boy") are really the only things I think Debut has going for it.

I just like dance music, and I thought Björk was a great as a dance diva. Also, the beats on Debut still sound incredibly timeless and fresh, which isn't the case with Post. (Not that it's a bad album by any means, but that trip hoppish 90's vibe was never my thing.)

(And I don't really mean "hate." I just think it's way overrated compared to the string from Post thru Vespertine.)

I'll admit I prefer "Violently Happy" to pretty much anything on Post.

lol I meant to say "unambiguously", clearly I am being distracted by the fuck-off snowstorm happening here

Homogenic is also really fucking awesome in my book.

Homogenic is my favorite, but Post is closer to my heart--my friend let me borrow his copy of it when I was 13 and then died in a car accident a couple weeks later.

I strenuously disagree. Overall, this is my favorite album of hers even though I never, ever, ever play "Army of Me" when I listen to it.

^yes. And I don't play Oh So Quiet, either. Never did. Funny, I clearly remember the first time listening to this album, and even then thinking that Army of Me sounded dated (for lack of a better term).

I'm gonna ban myself from Bjork threads for the next ten years but I still prefer Debut (by quite a distance) too.

Army of Me is a real turd.

and I LOVE(d) Bjork back then.

"Hyper-Ballad" is probably my favorite Bjork track.

i didn't really start listening to bjork until homogenic, so for some reason i haven't spent too much time with this or debut

Post inspired my first published review!

Dan and Eric OTM about the embarassment of riches here -- coulda picked "Possibly Maybe" or "Hyper-ballad" -- but I picked "Enjoy" because (1) it's a goddamn sexy song; (2) it led me to Maxinquaye.

"Hyper-Ballad" is probably my favorite Bjork track.

― Spencer Chow, Friday, December 19, 2008 11:52 AM Bookmark

Sorry, I can't stop watching the Army Of Me video. What was the question?

I don't think I said this album was an embarrassment of riches, but it is remarkably solid for the first 7 or 8 songs. Homogenic, otoh, is a straight-shot masterpiece from top to bottom. As consistently good as fucking Innervisions or Nu AmErykah.

As consistently good as fucking Innervisions or Nu AmErykah.

wow, people do really like that new badu.

Back in the day I would have said "Enjoy" or "Hyper-Ballad". Time and perspective make me say "Isobel".

lol, back in the day i would've said 'isobel', now i'd say 'enjoy'. i love post but it probably ranks as my 4th favourite bjork album. never understood why people raved over 'hyperballad', it's ok but a bit in the shadow of 'the modern things' for me...the brodsky quartet version is really excellent too.

bjork had some great b-sides (b-sides! remember them!) in this era too - offhand, 'my spine' (strange and playful collab w/evelyn glennie) and 'charlene' (which is making me think of...fireflies right now? uh) spring to mind.

and yeah, homogenic is one of THOSE incredible albums which is just straight-up genius throughout.

There's a great alternate version of "The Modern Things" on the otherwise kinda lame Family Tree box set.

"Headphones". easy.

i think "Big Time Sensuality" and "Violently Happy" are the worst things on Debut.

xxxpost Yes they do, but that was meant at least partially tongue-in-cheek, Jordan.

all Bjork albums seem to have an awesome first half and a dissapointing second. (except for Volta which sucked entirely, and i am a big Bjork fan)
I thought Medulla was the real grower.
In this case I'm voting for Isobel. (which is hehehe in the 2nd half, yes i know)

what, jed, you're going to seriously tell me "The Anchor Song" is better?

by the way I once did a playback version of It's Oh So Quiet on a carnival show, dressed up as Sonic the Hedgehog. I'm not kidding. One of the best thing I ever did in my life ;)

Anchor Song is fucking gorgeous.

I'm all for unorthodoxy when it comes to Björk, but that is not how you fucking arrange for saxophones.

I'll also say I much prefer "Like Someone in Love" to "It's Oh So Quiet" as far as the not-her stuff goes.

sometimes Life's Too Good

xp I detest cheap sentiment.

http://68.media.tumblr.com/d26e0176716ccb8ce067e5ded6f59649/tumblr_o8sj4a37Q21r4514so4_500.jpg
http://68.media.tumblr.com/0051390da99f7e64c1c9aa3500edb297/tumblr_o8sj4a37Q21r4514so1_500.jpg
http://68.media.tumblr.com/58d59fc52a31cd80e4c30fe2ee9a4621/tumblr_o8sj4a37Q21r4514so2_500.jpg
http://68.media.tumblr.com/5be56f21ef83705f9ca675c9c9348e98/tumblr_o8sj4a37Q21r4514so3_500.jpg

I'm very curious about the songwriting/production arrangements on this album. Apparently "Army of Me" and "The Modern Things" were initially recorded before Debut, but they sound very much "of a piece" (if anything on this album can be described in those terms) with the other electronic tracks sonically, sort of sitting halfway between the Nellee co-productions and "Enjoy". The production credits suggest that maybe Bjork built the bones of those songs with Graham Massey and then retouched them with Nellee Hooper?

The funny thing is that songwriting-wise there's nothing like those two tracks on Debut, and the other Nellee co-productions on Post ("Hyper-Ballad", "Isobel", "Possibly Maybe"), which I think Bjork wrote by herself, all follow Debut's relatively more conventional song template (the album's "Violently Happy", "Aeroplane" and "Venus As A Boy" respectively, perhaps).

So it's almost as if what changed when Bjork collaborated was not so much the production sound as the songwriting approach, though in this case it's more the collaborator sparking something out of Bjork that was there, given there's no way you could conceive of (say) "The Modern Things" as the product of any other musician.

by the way I once did a playback version of It's Oh So Quiet on a carnival show, dressed up as Sonic the Hedgehog. I'm not kidding. One of the best thing I ever did in my life ;)

― Ludo, Friday, December 19, 2008 3:35 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what's a "playback version on a carnival show"?

― how's life, Wednesday, May 23, 2012 6:45 AM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the start-stop sampled drums thing has been done so many times, but has it ever been done better and more subtly than in "Modern Things"?

I'm with Dan on this being better than Debut, but my Debut-hate has been well documented on other Björk threads.
― Eric H., Friday, December 19, 2008 1:30 PM (eight years ago)

God, that was NAGL. Glad I got right in the head.

I can't really describe why this album works better for me than other Bjork albums. I like her use of English on this album, it still feels tentative, carefully ironed. By "Homogenic" she's daring to sing "I'm going hunting / I'm the hunter" and "State of emergency / how beautiful to be / state of emergency / is where I want to be" and "I'm no fucking Buddhist, but this is enlightenment" and if that's the lyrical content of the song I am actually listening to right now? then I am not moved so much

Debut has a strong-as-anything A-side but the B-side loses me and "Violently Happy" was never my beer

Vespertine I can't remember anything about aside from "Cocoon" for being maybe her best-ever song, and "An Echo, A Stain" for doing some kind of amazing harmonic thing that I was always blown away by when it came out (and then realized it would make up a large chunk of her subsequent post-Valgeir sonic style, i.e. the middle section of Biophilia)

I'd probably rate Vulnicura as her 2nd best, Debut after that, then Biophilia because I think it's better than anybody else thinks it is, then Homogenic, Medulla, Vespertine, and I don't like Volta

Army Of Me is just incredible lyrical sentiment and is useful to anybody who is into music theory as being the most conspicuous use of Locrian mode in a song

Hyper-Ballad cannot be praised highly enough it's not just her best song it's THE best song, the tug-of-war between comfort and adventure, the sky-scraping chorus melody, the fact that the kick enters like just as an afterthought, and a string arrangement that is iconic

Modern Things was never my favourite

It's Oh So Quiet was redeemed by the Spike Jonze video

There's an "Enjoy" on every Bjork album but "Enjoy" is the best example of her Atari Teenage Riot vibe

You've Been Flirting Again is really necessary and perfectly executed and shouldn't be slept on, it's The Anchor Song of this album imo, and having a "new music-y" kind of moment works better as an interlude than as a coda imo

Isobel used to annoy me for "My name Isobel" until I realized it was meant to be a pun, this is Deodato's song though

Possibly Maybe is too long but otherwise perfect and the video is crazy

I Miss You never hit me but I love the trumpet at the end

Cover Me has a good lyric but otherwise keep it

Headphones, I don't really know how to describe this effectively but it's like they sent the masterer out for a coffee and made this blast open your stereo and rattle your bones, I felt like this was maybe a subconscious response in the Bass Wars to "Wandering Star", designed for anybody with a sub in their trunk

idk it's as perfect an album as I've ever heard, I love Bjork when she's eclectic

That makes me want to do my own version of that post, on Post and all the rest.

I can't fathom why they split "You've Been Flirting Again" and "Isobel" on the vinyl. That's a perfectly calibrated segue.

Hyperballad is mindblowing and it might be one of the best things she has made but “possibly maybe” is the one for me. I think it was the first song that made me interested in her.

Oddly enough the only song I don’t really like in this album is “army of me”, it sounds like a demo and is too repetitive. Love it more in concept than in execution.

She’d eventually make a much perfect version of an industrial freakout song with Pluto.

agreed re: "possibly maybe." as a huge dj shadow fan, it was the gateway and still remains my single favorite thing she's done. version on post live kills me every time.

all that said, pretty much everything on her albums was varying degrees of perfect in the 90s ("headphones"+remix have also been a big fav on this). just another one of the best of the decade for her.

would have voted "possibly maybe" without any thought whatsoever.

I think i was in the audience for the first ever performances of Army of Me and The Modern Things; Glastonbury 1994. Also a track called Moðir which supposedly is still unreleased. I used to love this album the most but i think it's Vespertine now.

Post is such a weird album, very much less than the sum of its parts for me. The shifts between certain songs are too big to really enjoy it as a front-to-back listen but the individual songs are basically impeccable

It is a really weird album, sounds like it doesn’t follow a clear lineage to the pop of the era and having things like “i miss you” or “it’s oh so quiet” in there makes it even more confusing. Thank god they didn’t really trace the path of what came after for her. For a time there she ran the risk of being typecasted as this quirky, kooky pop artist from a magic, elf country - and the label seemed to want that - and those singles don’t really help break that image. Hell, for a lot of people that still only know her for “it’s oh so quiet” or the swan dress she was never anything else.

So yeah Post doesn’t really work as an album, but every song is so good that I consider it more of a singles compilation. For a long time mu favorite one was either Vespertine or Homogenic, but Post was the unofficial soundtrack of the 2020 lockdown for me and I learned that I love it way more than I thought I did. It is both filled with bombastic pop but also very intimate and sensual moments.

Btw I revived after watching Trash Theory’s video of the album, I already knew most of the info in here but it’s still worth a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMsBuSKQo1s

Not my favorite Bjork, but the most attractive, charming album she's recorded

It is very charming. It’s the sort of album where a young, creative force is suddenly given the means and technology to do whatever they want and you can hear the excitement and awe they are experiencing while making their own music.

I remember there was an unusually large number of singles taken from Post - looking at discogs, half of the songs were released as official singles, with a couple of more as limited editions. The same thing happened with Debut, but I wonder if that was because the label was surprised at how well Debut continued selling (I remember it as one of those albums that was current for a long time). And of course Post itself had a remix album that I remember ignoring at the time because it was just the b-sides.

Post is also one of those 1990s mega productions where each song had a small army of programmers, producers, engineers, assistant engineers etc, which might explain why it feels disjointed. e.g. "The Modern Things" has three people on keyboards, three producers, a pair of programmers, two assistant engineers, two recording engineers. Production was split between three different studios in Nassau and London.

Along with U2's Zooropa I've always thought of it as one of those CD-era "peak ProTools" albums, where the producers had just got hold of ProTools and were keen to apply every digital effect in the preset box to everything all the time. I learn from the internet that Einar Orn played trumpet on "Enjoy". Sadly he didn't rap all over the album. That would have been something.

I wish Bjork had done more pop. She was strong enough to absorb pop without being overwhelmed with it. Like in Dune with the spice.

My god I feel so differently

Post is a perfect album and its diversity is its strength *cough, shit*

Listening to it is like an adventure movie progressing through different scenes and sets. "There isn't a weak track on it" there really isn't. "You've Been Flirting Again" which is arguably the 'least consequential' is also one of the most essential and beautiful. I couldn't Sophie's Choice any of these songs. OK I'd pick "Cover Me". But I'd really miss it.

My second favourite of her albums is Debut for nostalgia reasons but I'd argue that her "second greatest achievement" is Biophilia; again an album that has the same diversity and adventurousness

I often think of Neneh Cherry's Homebrew as a dry run for the polystylistic perversity of Post.

I still adore Debut. I love embryonic first albums.

and goon otm about the only weak track

Debut only sounds embryonic compared to Post (and then subsequent albums) IMO - even just in terms of sonics it would have sounded bleeding-edge in 1993, it's just that approaches to production were moving very quickly during this period.

oh yeah

imo "Isobel" is by far the greatest track, I mean there are so many good ones but that track feels so massive and pretty

I think "Isobel" is also helped by having a more conventionally structured lyric with a simple rhyming pattern (notably written by another writer). Many of her other lyrics seem both prosaic and "arbitrary" to me; it's a lot easier to communicate ideas in non-rhyming free verse, but I sometimes feel there's an artlessness about it that can seem lazy at worst.
Oddly, I don't have that problem with Vespertine, which seems to have lyrics in her usual style (I haven't done a close analysis).

"Enjoy" remains my jam.

I miss unveiling the Bjork tracks poll's results. What a happy time that was.

a state of emergency even

The transition from the end of "You've Been Flirting Again" into the start of "Isobel" is a moment of such breathtaking beauty...

Many of her other lyrics seem both prosaic and "arbitrary" to me; it's a lot easier to communicate ideas in non-rhyming free verse, but I sometimes feel there's an artlessness about it that can seem lazy at worst.

i've had this thought and also, about the combination of prosaic lyrics and drone is and ultimately I feel it's her way of asserting her free-spiritedness, or a kind of wanderlust perhaps. She's advocating I think for a more "let your mind go and your body will follow" kind of approach to life, conventional meter is constricting and not very Bjork-like. Songcraft isn't the point, and the thing that's really nice about her format is that it leaves a lot of room for experimentation with arrangement and record production.

"Isobel" feels more like the heroine in a movie compared to the other songs.

"Debut" is actually my favorite album of hers, with the asterisk that i only really know the first 4.

What it comes down to I guess is the leaner mixes and arrangements, the way each track showcases a different instrumental color alongside her voice (Bollywood strings, a harp, a Salvation Army band, the ambience of the restroom at a nightclub), and gives those textures the space to really astonish. From "Post" she's filling out a lot more space with pads and distortions, and there's a terrific textural/tactile sense but it's less about one particular element. And that makes it easier to sample individual songs, because each one gives you a full color palette whereas with "Debut", you have to listen to the whole album to get that.

Her melodies were her own from the start, and she found the right keyboard sounds. Nothing sounded like "Big Time Sensuality" and "Crying."

Yeah add those kbd presets to the list for sure.

Basically,

Debut = each song has a single, but supernaturally rich, dominant color and these combine to form the palette

Post = each song has a kaleidoscopic color pallette of its own, more or less

Homogenic = the whole album is monochromatic, as the title suggests

I think Bjork's indifference towards rhyming and meter was (certainly at that point of her career) a feature rather than a bug. Bjork's vocal melodies were so memorable and the sound of her voice so singular that I feel like more conventional songwriting could potentially feel more limiting. Bjork's performance approach already does the heavy lifting that might otherwise be carried by neat songwriting, such that when those two things are combined it doesn't necessarily create a net benefit.

In this regard, while "Isobel" works excellently, I actually find the formalism of the lyrics on "Bachelorette" to be a bit of a drawback (though don't get me wrong, it's a great song), it doesn't suit her and in my view creates more of a sense of distance between listener and performer, a sense of being sung down to.

Relatedly, I've long felt that "The Modern Things" was, if not necessarily the best song on Post, then perhaps the one that sums up the appeal of her work during this phase so consummately, the way it teeters between song and non-song but never gestures towards amelodic abstraction and never feels loosely structured (like, say, "Headphones", "All Neon Like" or much of her subsequent work), the way it teeters between lyrical meaning and glossolalia, the way the music sits in between various possible genres (albeit that this is common for Post) and veers between optimistic and eerie, and yet notwithstanding all of these things feels governed by a fierce internal logic.

Post inspired my first published review!

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Friday, December 19, 2008

College paper!

Bjork's performance approach already does the heavy lifting that might otherwise be carried by neat songwriting, such that when those two things are combined it doesn't necessarily create a net benefit.

otm

Relatedly, I've long felt that "The Modern Things" was, if not necessarily the best song on Post, then perhaps the one that sums up the appeal of her work during this phase so consummately

In that it was intended for Debut but evolved in its approach going into Post, it's a best-of-both-worlds proposition too.

modern things might be my favorite, the version of the family tree box is cool too.

OK, can we acknowledge that the sequence from "Army of Me" to "Isobel" is...astonishing?

It seems a bit odd to cut it off there TBH.

Listening back to this album, one of the things that really struck me is how much emphasis there is on the arrangements mutating in line with the narrative development of the songs. This is perhaps a key distinction from Debut, where the songs' arrangements typically follow a more conventional verse/chorus structure.

In particular, "Hyper-Ballad", "The Modern Things" and "I Miss You" are almost relentlessly mutational, especially in their use of rhythm, but the same is true to a lesser extent of most of the other tracks as well (e.g. the arrangement on "Enjoy" would be at the more maximal end of Tricky co-productions of the era (though not atypically so), but then is capped off by Einar Orn's horn freakouts, which doesn't feel like something that would happen if it was actually a Tricky track).

The jackhammer beat punctuating the second verse of "I Miss You" is particularly indicative I think, a very literalised ramping-up of exuberant tension.

Homogenic really ran with this idea I think, the arrangements "telling a story" as much as the vocals and lyrics.

OK, can we acknowledge that the sequence from "Army of Me" to "Isobel" is...astonishing?

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, June 28, 2022 7:04 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes, this album blows my mind.

stand by my position above that "the modern things" is the best song here. it makes me cry.

In that it was intended for Debut but evolved in its approach going into Post, it's a best-of-both-worlds proposition too.

― Eggs Benedick (Eric H.), Tuesday, 28 June 2022 19:23 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It would be fascinating to hear the pre-Debut versions of "Army of Me" and "The Modern Things". 808 State's Gorgeous from 1993 sounds rather more resolutely early-90s than Debut (kind of a mix of FSOL's Accelerator, Orbital's Green album and, um, Hyper-On Experience maybe?), so - unless Hooper had taken over co-production from Massey - it's difficult for me to imagine what they would have ended up sounding like if they'd ended up on Debut.

(meanwhile 808 State's Don Solaris from 1996 does sound like "Army of Me" and "The Modern Things", which raises the question as to how much if anything Bjork had to do with getting them to that sound)

I don’t know if it’s that I’m not a native english speaker but the main attractive for me in his vocals is precisely how unusual and freeformed they are.

While I do appreciate more traditionally structured songs like Bachelorette or Isobel, her vocals sound more like broadway musical to my ears on those two songs and I find myself more interested in the arrangements than her actual vocals. Of course, she pulls it off effortlessly and I respect it but I don’t think I’d be much of a fan if that was her usual style.

Her not his, sorry I suck at english pronouns

Anyways, Isobel. Great song, I love it. Glad it’s the only song in that style.

Actually I think I ended up loving Post the most because every song feels very unique and different from the following one.