Bjork Post Poll

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.