Bjork
Vulnicura, 2015
And just like that, Bjork is back. She’s a monolith, isn’t she? An artist we’re accustomed to hearing little about for long stretches of time, giving her the energy and space she needs to do whatever she does next, while we (some of us, anyway) wait patiently for her next big move. That’s been the arrangement for more than 20 years, and it was supposed to be the arrangement for Vulnicura too. Then in true 2015 fashion, a disruption: the album leaked almost as soon as it was announced, release plans for March were scrapped, and the project was rushed to iTunes. In a way, the element of surprise is strangely fitting — Vulnicura is a song cycle exploring the dissolution of the singer’s relationship with artist Matthew Barney, each track an emotional milestone around the breakup. It’s clearly not a loss she was expecting, though opener “Stonemilker” (written 9 months before the split, according to liner notes) smells trouble ahead. “Show me emotional respect/I have emotional needs,” she pleads in the frankly broken, open-hearted chorus. “Find our mutual coordinate.” Her immeasurable loss has been transformed, somehow, into a listener’s gain.
[audio https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14312140/01%20Stonemilker.m4a]
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