2007 Björk "Volta" Review, The Observer

CD OF THE WEEK

Now you better believe that Bjork's angry...

Bjork
Volta (One Little Indian) £11.99

Bjork’s latterday works, such as Medulla in 2004 and 2005’s film soundtrack, Drawing Restraint 9, were impressive but rarefied. Volta is a real volte-face. On her ninth solo album, the Icelandic composer plunges back into the avant clubs on the arm of hip hop maestro Timbaland. On ‘Innocence’, you can hear someone getting beaten up at a rave: ‘Thwap! hurgh!' On ‘Earth Intruders’, a rag-tag army of woaded tribesmen marches polyrhythmically on the First World, armed with poisoned thumb pianos. You can’t move for Timbaland’s beats these days, but Bjork doesn’t follow herds. He first came to her 10 years ago, cap in hand, for a sample of ‘Joga’.

The beats aren’t even the most exciting thing about Volta. Bjork has engaged a superlative Icelandic brass section, who mimic ships in fog. Two improv drummers, the blistering Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt) and the more free-form Chris Corsano (sometime Sunburned Hand of the Man) let rip over their assigned tracks, without having heard a note beforehand.

In another lunge towards accessibility, Mercury-winning hermaphroditic crooner Antony Hegarty joins Bjork on two songs. He can’t match her vocal gymnastics, but he dissolves nicely at the end of their duet about lust, ‘Dull Flame of Desire’. The thumb pianos, meanwhile, come courtesy of Konono Nol, who subvert Western assumptions about worthy African music by being a Congolese experimental electronic outfit. One of the most complex tracks, ‘Hope’, finds Timbaland ducking around the cascading notes of kora player Toumani Diabate, as Bjork voices her most polemical lyric yet.

Perhaps the most startling thing about Volta is this anger. Bjork allows herself a riot girrrl moment on ‘Declare Independence’, an anti-imperialist squall. In ‘Vertebrae by Vertebrae’, Mother Nature takes her revenge on Manhattan (and the scientific chauvinism that suppressed the lunar calendar) by scrawling ‘13’ on all the missing 13th floors of skyscrapers.

Bjork once sang: ‘If you complain once more/ You’ll meet an army of me.’ It’s fearsome. 

KITTY EMPIRE