Bjork Post Poll

Strangely Norman Tebbitesque lyrics to that song but it kicked her Glastonbury set into gear - lasers!

"Army of Me" is a click too slow for me, edging the beat from being menacing into just being plodding and stodgy. I also think the transition from "Army of Me" to "Hyper-Ballad" is the weak link on the album where the end of a song doesn't accurately set you up for the beginning of the next one.

http://devonrecordclub.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/bjork-post-round-28-nicks-choice/

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

"army of me" is incredible, both as a song and as a thing to listen to when you need to be jolted out of moping around and feeling sorry for yourself. i think this song has helped people.

More a song I'd rather play for other people than myself.

Also, "sex without touching" sounds a lot less menacing now than it did in '95.

i think it's useful. i have an easier time taking tough love advice from bjork than i do people i actually know. "the modern things" should have won this poll though. when she starts singing in icelandic it's the most beautiful thing on the record.

I miss pissing off people in my car with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur1RBKNfdCk

I think I took my summer car trips with the wrong people in high school.

Problem is, I still actually want to meet an army of Bjork.

me too, but i'd want them to like/approve of me

You're probably right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lhgiuTFxxM

"the modern things" should have won this poll though. when she starts singing in icelandic it's the most beautiful thing on the record.

― tɹi.ʃɪp (Treeship), Wednesday, January 22, 2014 1:12 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Agree with this.

Apparently I was one of the the 3 that voted for it, so I do too.

It's odd that this is only my fourth or fifth favorite Bjork album, since it was so intimately connected with what now seems like the happiest time of my life.

there are very few moments in life as good as this

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.