RECENT REVIEWS:

Various Artists
Lounge-a-palooza
Pop/Rock
(10/01/97)

Mariah Carey
Butterfly
Pop/Rock
(9/30/97)

Various Artists
We Will Fall:
The Iggy Pop Tribute
Pop/Rock
(9/29/97)

Keith Jarrett
La Scala
Jazz
(9/26/97)

The Rolling Stones
Live at Soldier Field
Pop/Rock
(9/25/97)

- - - - - - - -

Sound Salvation
By Sarah Vowell
True blue tributes
(09/19/97)

- - - - - - - -

Table Talk
Xanadu? Bananarama? Billy Joel? Fess up the uncool music you once loved in Table Talk.

Björk ^{| HOMOGENIC | ELEKTRA}

BY KEITH MOERER | When a volcano erupts in Iceland, glaciers are instantly bulldozed and a wall of water strikes back. The extremes of hot and cold have always existed in Björk's music, though mostly on alternating tracks: the mechanized rumble of "Army of Me," the lush pop melancholy of "You've Been Flirting Again." With her fourth album, "Homogenic," Björk combines the warmth of Iceland's String Octet with Mark Bell's programmed beats on the same songs, provoking shave-headed DJs to swoon and conservatory-trained musicians to party like it's 1899.

The flood unleashed is a torrent of emotions, some of them exotic, some as conventional as Björk's plea for strength in the face of bruised self-esteem: "How can I be so immature/To think he would replace/The missing elements in me?/How extremely lazy of me!" When I first heard these words, the entire lyrics to "Immature," I was devastated. Could it be that Björk, the single Nordic mom who dates trip-hop DJs in London and attacks tabloid reporters in Bangkok, is simply another Woman Who Loves Too Much? Then I listened again, this time to the song's hypnotic keyboard figure and Björk's strangled phrasing, and discovered a mantra shimmering with hurt but also the spit of self-reproach and defiance.

Recorded in Spain with English DJ Bell and Brazilian string arranger Eumir Deodato, "Homogenic's" 10 songs present love as a heavy-lidded promise and a cold-stare threat, and sometimes both. On "Bachelorette," she describes herself as a "fountain of blood" and her lover as a "bird on the brim, hypnotized by the whirl." After inviting him to dip his beak, he lets him go with a warning: "If you forget my name you will go astray/Like a killer whale trapped in a bay." The song was originally written for Bertolucci's movie "Stealing Beauty," and it sounds it. The string arrangement is overripe by a day with melodrama and fussy pretension.

Deodato's orchestration works much better when there's a worthy anchor, whether it's the backwards accordion and fluttery percussion of "Hunter," or flutelike keys and distorted backbeat of "Five Years." But as beautiful as the glass harmonica and clavichord are at times, the album's real star is Björk's overdubbed voice, capable of soaring in a tightly choreographed formation, or stretching out with the melismatic slur of a jazz singer ruined by love. Homogenic ends with "All is Full of Love," a collaboration between Björk and her current boyfriend, producer Howie B. Musically. It's built around a wash of sampled keyboards, but it's Björk's vocals, a keen echo promising salvation but expecting heartache, that lingers. Rarely has electronic music sounded this other-worldly beautiful and humbly human at the same time.
SALON | Oct. 2, 1997