On new album, Björk a daughter, a mother and a universe
No way around it: “Fossora” (One Little Independent Records), Björk’s 10th studio album, can be heavy-going, thorny and intense. But it’s well worth an effort.
“Fossora” continues Bjork’s lifelong project of linking personal experience to larger natural and cosmic processes — to place herself in the universe and the universe within herself. It arrives five years after “Utopia,” a determinedly airy album featuring the sounds of birds and flutes.
“Fossora,” derived from the Latin for “digger,” prizes earthiness: the fleshy physicality of life and death, pleasure and suffering, romantic and parental love. To ground the music, Björk’s new tracks often feature low-register instruments such as bass clarinets and trombones (although flutes also reappear).
Björk’s production and arrangements on “Fossora” present her at her most unapologetically abstruse: closer to contemporary chamber music than to pop, rock or dance music. Her melodies, as always, are bold and declarative, and delivered with passion and suspense. But on “Fossora,” Björk doesn’t necessarily center those melodies as the hooks they could be. And although she collaborates on some tracks with Indonesian electronic producers Gabber Modus Operandi, she’s not aiming for dance floor beats.
In her new songs, the tempos often fluctuate organically, like breathing. And more than
ever, Björk places her voice within a teeming musical ecosystem that’s likely to include a tangle of instrumental polyphony and layered vocals, with every element of the mix insisting on multiplicity.
For much of the album, Björk, 56, contemplates the 2018 death of her mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, and her own generational roles as a child and a mother. (Björk’s children, Sindri and Isadora, appear among the album’s backing vocals.)
In “Sorrowful Soil,” she summons overlapping, antiphonal choirs for a prismatic yet coolly scientific consideration of motherhood: “In a woman’s life she gets 400 eggs but only two or three nests.” It’s followed by “Ancestress,” with gamelanlike gongs and a string ensemble shadowing Björk’s vocal lines as she recalls moments
of her mother’s life and death.
But the album also recognizes obstinate, essential life forces: love, hope and — as a biological analogue — subterranean fungal growth. The album’s graphics and the video for its opening song, “Atopos” (from the Greek for “out of place” or “unusual”), are full of mushroom imagery. In a song titled “Fungal City,” amid tendrils of clarinet countermelodies and pizzicato strings, Björk exults in a new romance, singing, “His vibrant optimism happens to be my faith too.”
The album concludes with “Her Mother’s House,” an abstract near-lullaby that envisions children’s rooms as chambers of a mother’s heart. It intertwines the multitracked voices of Björk and her daughter singing, “The more I love you, the better you will survive.”
They find an evolutionary purpose in an emotional bond.
“Fossora” doesn’t aim to be a crowd-pleaser. It’s hard to imagine these studio phantasms onstage (although Björk may well find a way). But Björk’s interior worlds are vast.
Song of the moment Paramore, “This Is Why” (Atlantic Records):
Paramore has regrouped after Hayley Williams’ 2020 and 2021 solo albums showed how far her music could stretch beyond punk-pop and new wave.
On the title song of its first LP since 2017, “This Is Why” (due in February) Paramore goes for wiry syncopation, not punk drive and power chords. “If you have an opinion, maybe you should shove it,” Williams sings, with biting mock sweetness, over a backbeat and a hopping bass line.
Choppy, clenched guitar chords — with more than a hint of INXS — goad her as she sneers an irritated response to a sourly divided national mood: “This is why I don’t leave the house.”