Bjork
does her usual synaesthesic thing on lead single Crystalline,
from forthcoming album Biophilia.
The song is a meditation on the qualities of crystal, and the
connections therein to love and the universe (usual Bjork topics.) So
how does it sound? Not too surprisingly, like a crystal. Listen for
instance to the xylophone that appears throughout. It’s not a
soothing or comfortable sound, like you might expect from a
xylophone, but hard and brittle. Each note sounds like a point on the
surface of a diamond. Furthermore, the notes don’t progress in a
relaxing form up the scale, but jump about. It’s like there’s
a distance between them that one has to transverse, again
forming a diamond structure.
In
emotional terms too, Bjork aims to recreate the qualities of a
crystal. She sounds both fragile and hard, singing some lines like
she’s made of glass, but then holding a note and rising up, like
she won’t break apart. Of course, none of this is especially new to
Bjork. I write a blog post last month on Human
Behaviour,
in which she brings a jungle-like sound to her musings on human
interaction, to represent its strangeness to her. She
obviously digs taking an abstraction and representing it in music.
This, though, doesn’t make Crystalline less
enjoyable, in spite of its obviousness.
Full
track available at Disco
Naivete.
