Bjork Post Poll

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.

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

No, but "Come to Me" and "One Day" and "There's More to Life Than This" are!

"The Anchor Song", "Come to Me" "Aeroplane" are my favourite things on debut. i agree with you on Homogenic though.

voted for "I miss you". definitely prefer post to debut.

Yeah, I need to learn to just steer the conversation to Homogenic whenever Debut comes up.

I think Homogenic is her best album but Post is my favorite.

Vespertine 4 life

i am probably alone in this but i think Helmet's cover of "Army of Me" is one of the greatest covers of any song ever
http://www.imeem.com/people/VF-Iw6/music/nbLkak8D/helmet_army_of_me_bjork_cover/

Dan I am just agreeing with you all over the place here

Homogenic is the one that for me has the dated 90s production (late 90s techno vs early 90s trip hop?), but that may be because I'll still fuck with some trip hop, but techno is dead to me.

I don't think I said this album was an embarrassment of riches,

No, I said it.

Debut is maybe a notch below Post; Bjork seems to be wearing a musical straitjacket, and it's becoming, as far as it goes; it sounds like she's struggling to say something in an idiom she's halfway to figuring out. That's why I love "Come To Me," "Violently Happy," and "Venus as a Boy."

I feel like ███████████ you right this second!

I don't know if it's the best thing on there but "The Modern Things" is my jam on this album.

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

Dan we are EXACTLY THE SAME IN EVERY WAY. Well, in Bjorkpinions at least.

Along with It's Oh So Quiet, Army of Me is one of the most insular tracks on the album. But more than any Bjork album, I see post as being comprised beautifully of many insular pieces that gel together more with time. these days i even put army of me on by itself sometimes!

"It's Oh So Quiet" is a great song and her best ever vocal performance. This is not to say that the other, and less conventional, songs on this album are bad in any way, but "It's Oh So Quiet" is just too great.

Also props to "Possibly Maybe" but it sounded better after Goldie remixed it.

What is with the disliking of "Army of Me"?

"Isobel" by far.

Worst track is "Quiet" though.

How can Geir like "It's Oh So Quiet" so much when Bjork didn't write it? FWIW I boringly went with "Hyperballad" though "Headphones" runs it close because it's sexier.

"It's Oh So Quiet" is a great song and her best ever vocal performance. This is not to say that the other, and less conventional, songs on this album are bad in any way, but "It's Oh So Quiet" is just too great.

― Geir Hongro, Saturday, 20 December 2008 02:10 (Yesterday) Permalink

what an awful thing to say

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

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

― USICMAKEULOSECONTROL (The Reverend), viernes 19 de diciembre de 2008 14:01 (2 days ago)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

"Enjoy", I think. Almost all of the rest of these tracks (as good as they were) were improved upon by their remixes. Actually I guess "Army of Me" wasn't.

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.