Guided by Voices (Page 4)

But on further listening--close listening--the album begins to open itself up to you. The man-as-machine verisimilitude of the beatboxers is gimmicky, but Medúlla teems with other, strange and beautiful sounds that can only be produced by vocal chords crammed into traditional verse-chorus pop songs and spread across sprawling abstract pieces, chopped up and reconfigured like dance tracks. The album's centerpiece is "Oceania," a ravishing song written for the opening ceremony of the Athens Summer Olympics, in which Björk sings in the voice of "Mother Oceania," cooing comfort to her "little ones": islands and continents. "Oceania" features a gritty lead vocal, but the song's tour de force is the arrangement Björk has composed for the London Choir, a gloriously burnished version of haunted house music--swooping, rising and descending scales, the sound of a ship being pitched on ocean swells.

Rock journalists frequently refer to Björk as a "pixie"--and to be sure, this tiny woman with twinkling, almond-shaped eyes and a funny accent has an air of the enchanted wood-sprite about her. But no one who has heard Björk's grand, growling signature songs like "Hyper-Ballad" or "Joga" can doubt that she's a diva--not a modern-day ice queen diva like Madonna but a red-blooded diva in the Piaf-Callas-Billie Holiday mode, a fearless emotional exhibitionist who stuffs and mounts her joy and pain in song after song. Many of Björk's best moments are almost too personal to bear. "Pagan Poetry," from Vespertine (2001), builds slowly, with Björk wailing over swelling keyboard crescendos--"The darkest pit in me/It's pagan poetry.... He makes me want to hurt myself again"--until, at the song's four-minute mark, all the music drops away, leaving Björk utterly exposed: "I love him, I love him/I love him, I love him/I love him, I love him/I love him, I love him," she sings.

With Medúlla, Björk reaches a new milestone in her journey inward. Since launching her solo career in 1993 (she had been a singer in a post-punk guitar band, the Sugarcubes), she has continually sought more spartan settings for her songs, progressing from extroverted dance music through increasingly austere forms of techno. "Medulla" is Latin for marrow, and the record, stripped of nearly everything besides vocals, is an attempt at the deepest kind of unmediated musical expression--fitting for songs that reach beneath the skin and inside the bones.

But Medúlla's most startling moments of emotional nakedness aren't "Pagan Poetry"-style flights; they're not even especially musical. They're little sonic details, buried deep in Medúlla's mix, some detectable only through a good pair of headphones: In "Pleasure Is All Mine," the sound of heavy panting, panned to the left of the stereo spectrum, and a gulping, swallowing sound in the far-right channel; elsewhere, stifled sobs, contented sighs, rasps, mewlings, a cry that sounds like a woman in childbirth and the most basic voice-music of all, the flutter and rush of indrawn and exhaled breath. These bewitching, unsettling sounds point beyond Björk's own universe of love and pain to the pleasantly utopian idea that even the tone-deaf among us are singers, that wherever there is a pair of lungs there is a kind of music. The most erotic lyrics you'll hear this year aren't about sex, they're Björk's paean to the mechanics of breathing in "Triumph of a Heart": "Smooth soft red velvety lungs/Are pushing a network of oxygen joyfully/Through a nose, through a mouth."

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