I initially thought “Triumph of a Heart” was a ridiculous way to close the album, especially given that one-third of the songs could be programmed into montages of Catholic baptisms in the trailer for Ladder 49, but I’ve come around to it. Throughout the album, you can feel Björk struggle with her own “Obstruction” (Lars taught her well) of fashioning an electronic pop album with very little electricity and even fewer orthodox pop song structures. Medúlla opens with a collage of elements that would, in any other pop song, be considered the latticework — howling, winter wind choir clusters, modified bass-vocal chest hits that bow up and down like the world’s lowest syndrum — and puts them together in what sounds like precisely the wrong order. When she says “the pleasure is all mine,” it almost sounds like a threat. “Where is the Line” goes even further beyond the pale. The opening, with Björk’s hook doubled down a few octaves by a filtered bass voice, is as “rule-breaking” in pop music as Ozu’s 180º reverse shots. You just simply don’t do unison, especially in such radically separate ranges. The bass line breaks away to provide an uptight counterpoint as Björk turns her accusations into a bona fide, multilayered Fugue a la Bach. Only with Rahzel breakbeats.
It’s a heady listen, to be sure, and as soon as it seems to surface for air (the EQ-starmaps of “Desired Constellation” should be familiar astrology to anyone with even a passing familiarity with “Cocoon,” “Scatterheart” and “Undo”), in slams something like an “Ancestors,” which sounds like it could be either a museum of natural history diorama coming to horny life after closing time or the lonesome death of the Yeti. Though I’m fairly convinced “Ancestors” will snare a reputation as Björk’s “Treefingers” (or insert reasonable parallel), I think it’s probably the key to understanding what the album is about (as per other reviews: neopaganism, the frustration of self-imposed restrictions, sex, sex with gremlins, sex with Matthew Barney, sex between Matthew Barney and gremlins who have together burrowed their way into the deepest corner of your ear’s cochlea). Which makes the mind-blowing sense of discovery accompanying “Mouth’s Cradle” all the more powerful. A sonic joissance with some of Björk’s finest songwriting. In particular, the arrangement of the vocals during the song’s climax is ridiculously, insanely muscular. I wasn’t in choir, so I don’t know the term for these chords (I’m hoping that the Alpha Male……….’s roommate can help me out here), but I always refer to them as the “Sun is rising/Son is risen” chords. (Very popular among conductors of Lutheran college choirs.) They’re the type of chords where it seems the arranger has managed to use every single note of the scale in precisely the order, the syntax, the very code they can all be used simultaneously and still make sense.
I know that one acquaintance of mine has expressed dismay over the words Björk musingly whisper-sings during the song’s “sunrise”: “I need a shelter to build an altar away from all Osamas and Bushes.” Ballsy, to say the least, given that most of Björk’s listening audience (in the States, at any rate) would probably counter that apathy is a political luxury that no one can afford in Election Year 2004. But I can’t say I disagree with her impulse, and the isolationism of the lyric is rendered desirable through the emotional “alternative” of her music. (A life guided by politics is already dead to the instructive and aesthetic possibilities of art, she seems to be saying, and there’s more to life than this, indeed.) Nevertheless, she does call them out, and another way to interpret it could be that she has already imagined Medúlla, with all its caveman beatboxing and proto-oozing choir wails, as an album from the great beyond — of the post-apocalyptic, post-Christian/Muslim extremist, post-industrial world left behind by this, the Final Generation. Medúlla rises from the ashes of the molten horror synapse… or at least takes the baton from Snake at the conclusion of Escape from L.A.