Back when I reviewed Crack-Up, the first point I made was that “pretty” does not necessarily mean the same thing as “awesome;” the fact that Crack-Up turned out to be both, however, didn’t give me much space to expand on that. Utopia is a bit more interesting on that regard.
Utopia is incredibly, impossibly, transcendently pretty, and it only gets prettier on each listen. The sounds aren’t so much chords or melodies as membranes, and floaty, diaphanous ones at that, like the fins of deep sea animals. And, like with deep sea animals, what makes it genuinely beautiful are the little veins and bioluminescent patches you notice on closer examination on this: the backing vocals, for example, on “Blissing Me,” or the filigree of strings in the background of “Tabula Rasa”, both almost silent. When producing OK Computer, Nigel Godrich set up microphones in a cave to record the ambience, which runs through the whole album. On Utopia, Bjork seems to have done something similar on the bottom floor of a deserted twenty storey building, in which a string quartet is playing on the top floor, and noticing it doesn’t so much make the album lovelier as it does demonstrate exactly why everything was sounding so lovely before. And it’s a bunch of different flavours of loveliness, too. “Claimstaker”’s timbre of choice is subdued, harmonized hooting. “Blissing Me”, harps. “Tabula rasa”, mostly woodwinds.
Now – there are absolutely plenty of moments on this album where the awesomeness lives up to the prettiness. “Arisen My Senses” and “Blissing Me” start the album off more strongly than most others this year. The former, in particular, demonstrates some genuine genius in the way Bjork manages to put some slightly harder thudding into the gauziness of the album’s sound without changing tone or mood; you can feel each feather-light chord billow as the percussion bats it cattily from behind. The whole thing ends up coming together as a bizarre, polyrhythmic carousel of multitracked vocals, percussion and colour, and it’s as staggering to behold as it is perplexing. And there are motes of genius every so often after that. The birdsong-mimicking title track, the verdant arpeggios of on “Losss” – these are all fascinating enough bits of schtick to stick in the mind. But overall, the album definitely evaporates before it ends. It feels weird criticising Bjork’s singing voice, here – and to be clear, Bjork is one hell of a singer, both creatively and technically – but when the songs start getting a bit boneless her voice, teleporting up the register and then swooping back down, moves from being another membrane to being the most solid bit of the song, and her voice isn’t designed for that, any more than tent-lining is designed to be used in place of tent-poles. “The Gate” is undoubtedly the low point of the album, with Bjork’s crooning “I care for you, I care for you…” sounding less like a vocal performance and more like a vocal warm-up being done in a room where someone happens to be playing downtempo. “Body Memory,” “Features Creatures,” “Future Forever,” although texturally varied, all seem to hang about mood-wise in the same tonally colourful Arcadian alien garden, and while that’s fine in principle, Bjork continues to rely on the garden to impress you, and doesn’t really do anything in there each time to justify her revisiting it.
Utopia isn’t a bad album by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not sure if I really recommend it as a whole. Clocking at 71 minutes 38 seconds it’s definitely on the long side; if it had been closer to the 45 mark, my response might have been “Great, but maybe a little padded”; as is, my response is “if you wade through all the padding, there’s some great stuff in here.”
hairy music reviews 