Live: Björk Transcends
Björk, Radio City Music Hall
May 2, 2007
Björk: "Where Is The Line"
from Medúlla
To say the Icelandic performer Björk sings, looks and dances like no one else isn't much of a critical note. But last night, touring behind her new album Volta, and on the road at length for the first time in more than 4 years, I couldn't think of any show remotely close to what transpired. Which is not to say it was freakish or gaudy (OK, maybe a touch — flags featuring frogs and trout lined the backdrop), but the arrangements of nearly all her songs were repurposed with a ten-piece Icelandic brass band and spindly electronic textures. Orchestral ballads, like the ever-gripping "Jóga," turned into funerla dirges. Spastic vocal exercises, like the above "Where Is The Line?" from 2004's Medúlla, sounded like frantic broken beat. Even the accordion-led "The Anchor Song" took on a bombastic reconfiguration with the horns — still spare, but showier and in a way stronger than its original incarnation in the cavernous Radio City. Even at 41 years old, the fashionable singer — wrapped in a shimmering red frock, and barefoot, naturally, all night — emits this wonderful sense that she's never done reconsidering herself or her music.
Though show opener "Earth Intruders" was grimly D.O.A. — effortfully tribal, tunelessly dim — things immediately picked up with a sweet, spare rendition of "Venus As A Boy," one of the singer's best known songs. That shift, from the punishing to the precious was a startling thing to watch. She changed modes in an instant, something she did several times last night, with a marked transition from a gorgeously measured "Pleasure Is All Mine"-"Pagan Poetry"-"Jóga" trifecta to the abrupt "Where Is the Line?"-"Army of Me"-"Innocence." She never missed a beat.
It has been written so many times, that Björk has a voice that fills you up — at this point it's a trope. But there are the moments — :31 seconds into "Jóga," :49 seconds into "Army of Me," or more recently in the chorus of "The Dull Flame of Desire," a duet with the lamentable Antony and the crushing blasts of the mesmerizing "Declare Independence," her closing song last night — where you are not in the same place you were before that moment. (Though not everyone was as entranced, apparently — two girls nearly came to blows amidst the serene "Jóga" — there's no accounting a New York-Björk crowd.) Still, Björk, unlike so many performers, has little trouble not simply recreating those moments but building on them, filling them out, making them new and better. Last night was no exception.
Björk: "Declare Independence"
from the forthcoming Volta
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