Guided by Voices (Page 3)

Waits has an unlikely spiritual cousin in Björk, the little Icelandic sprinkler of musical fairy dust whose new album was released a few weeks back. Like Waits, Björk is a pop singer-composer-producer with a tenacious avant-garde streak; like Waits, she's a romantic, a creator of her own beautiful and idiosyncratic grand weepers. And now, in the same season that has brought us Waits's debut as a vocal percussionist, Björk has delivered Medúlla, on which she's abandoned instruments almost entirely, gathered a motley group of vocalists--hip-hop beatboxers; rock singers of various stripes; an Inuit throat singer; a "human trombonist"; and two choirs--and paid extravagant tribute to the power of the human voice.

Medúlla is not exactly unprecedented. From barbershop quartets to gospel close-harmony groups to doo-wop to the kooky a cappella experiments of Todd Rundgren to Bobby McFerrin's novelty hits, vocals-only pop music has a long history. But the scale and ambition of Medúlla is something different--"Don't Worry, Be Happy" it ain't. Björk has continually shoved at the edges of pop song form, embracing the skittering beats and digital white noise of cutting-edge electronica, scoring tunes for laptop and string octet, pushing her songs toward the grandeur and abstraction of contemporary classical music. On Medúlla Björk and a team of producers--Mark Bell, Valgeir Sigurdsson, who has worked with Icelandic group Múm, the San Francisco-based experimental duo Matmos--move further afield, crafting what amount to a cappella mini-symphonies. Even Björk's most devoted fans, who relish her odd juxtapositions, may find themselves bewildered by songs that hover somewhere between Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Meredith Monk and ambient techno.

Certainly, there's never been a pop tune quite like "Where Is the Line," which dangles Björk's lead vocal melody between a rubbery beat and the dissonant drone of the Icelandic Choir. Midway through, the choir breaks into an eerie whistle; several phantom Björks surface via the magic of multitracking, echoing the vocal line and dissolving in a haze of radio static; and human trombonist Gregory Purnhagen, punk singer Mike Patton and the virtuoso human beatboxer Rahzel layer on grunts and growls that ricochet across the stereo spectrum.

Other songs are even weirder. "Sonnets/Unrealities XI" pairs Björk with the Icelandic Choir in a plainchant setting of an e.e. cummings poem--call it Gregorian Pop. "Ancestors," one of the few tunes to add extra instrumentation, finds Björk singing a stately melody--in lyrics that might be English, Icelandic or just plain gibberish--backed by a few stray piano chords and the quavering cries of throat-singer Tanya Tagaq.

It's tempting to dismiss Medúlla as a pretentious stunt. Björk is a famously artsy-fartsy pop star--a darling of the Whitney Biennial set, the girlfriend of artist Matthew Barney, the star of Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, an avant-garde fashion plate who turned up at the 2001 Oscars swaddled in a swan carcass, looking like a walking Damien Hirst installation. In a Rolling Stone interview before the release of Medúlla, she announced, "Instruments are so over," an idea that might play well in the Scandinavian salons that brought us the Dogme 95 film movement but sounds silly down here on planet Earth.

A song like "Triumph of a Heart" does little to dispel the skepticism. It's a catchy, propulsive dance tune, reminiscent of several earlier Björk club anthems, in which Rahzel and an amazing Japanese beatboxer named Dokaka replicate the 4/4 bump of a house-music track. In fact, the beatboxers do such an astonishing job of mimicking the sound of a kick drum and various accompanying electronic squiggles and beeps, you can't help but ask: What's the point? In the past, Björk has made gorgeous dance music by sampling and looping computers that impersonate instruments; here, she makes gorgeous dance music by sampling and looping singers impersonating computers that impersonate instruments. It's a neat trick, but why bother paying for the plane flights and studio time when you can boot up your laptop and get the same result? At such moments, Medúlla seems like something rather more mundane than the herald of a post-instrumental new musical order: Björk Unplugged.

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