First Look: Bjork’s Biophilia

Out this week on One Little Indian/Nonesuch, it's a delicate and tactile treat.

By A.D. Amorosi

Get beyond recent solo efforts like the glacial Volta and throat warbling Medula. Put aside the app chatter, the details of her new album's delays and the talk of her cold fusion of the warmly natural and the coolly scientific Bjork's softly epic Biophilia is a delicate and highly tactile treat, a unique gem of innovation (pipe organs driven by computers, the mallet-tickled gameleste) and gentle real soul whose breathy endearing heights Bjork hasn't touched in a minute.

Not as a composer, a lyricist or even as a vocalist has she sounded so exceptionally grand yet winsomely intimate. While the temperate "Hollow" threatens to swallow the tiny voiced Icelandic artist in its torrid tornado's vortex, she breaks through with wondrous curiosity and passion in the dippy funeral "Cosmogony" as "heaven's bodies whirl around me." Throughout "Mutual Core," the funeral continues as a churchy organ groove lays still and bubbling only to find itself struck by Gatling gun rhythms and a Bjork vocal so raw and unbound it stops the show with its epiphanies.

Lyrically, too, Bjork is at her most compelling, talking up the sensual potency of dread that guides  "Virus" ("I adapt, contagious, you open up, say welcome") and cuttingly enunciating sexuality's boldness on "Thunderbolt"  ("My romantic gene is dominant and it hungers for union"). Near perfection.