taken the long road to the meticulous sparkle and deep feeling of
Vespertine. The teen queen of Reykjavik's early-1980s punk uprising, Bjork hit the world stage with the Sugarcubes, charging the band's pop-art mischief with operatic force and lyric vulnerability, a combination that at its best - on the 1988 album
Life's Too Good - felt like a young girl's diary thrown into a tornado. Bjork's first records after leaving the Sugarcubes,
Debut (1993) and
Post (1995), were piquant stews of hip-hop gesture, gingerbread electronica and fairy-tale parable. But in spite of all that imagination and Bjork's good taste in collaborators (Nellee Hooper, Talvin Singh, 1970s-fusion maestro Eumir Deodato), those albums now seem incomplete, shotgun displays of her remarkable vocal range and the unresolved differences between the worldly Bjork and her perpetual inner elf.
Vespertine is a particle beam in comparison, as weightless as light but concentrated with direction. There is nothing remotely close to drumming on any of the album's twelve tracks. The flurry of rhythm at the start of "Cocoon" has the gravity of a spider scurrying across linoleum. The electronic beats running under the glassy ballad "It's Not Up to You" are mostly drips and squishes, the soft gallop of baby boots in fresh mud. Vespertine is awash in strings and choirs, but Bjork exercises care in spreading the spangle. In "Pagan Poetry," she deploys the implied heaven of Zeena Parkins' harp and a flotilla of music boxes with an Asian-teahouse touch. The faint winds of synthesizer in "An Echo a Stain" magnify Bjork's cries and purrs with such reverbed clarity that she even seems to breathe in melody.
The tidy drama of the programming and arrangements on Vespertine suits the physical electricity of Bjork's voice. Her self-consciousness on earlier albums is gone; Bjork moves through this music with focused, contagious pleasure. It is no accident that Bjork's helpmates on Vespertine include the San Francisco computer duo Matmos and that the long, gorgeous "Unison" features a sample from the German group Oval. Vespertine is the closest any pop-vocal album has come to the luxuriant Zen of the new minimalist techno, even
