Category: Bjork

Debut – Björk (1993)

I’ve written a few times before about this album, but I’ve never bettered what I said over on the old blog in October 2009, which I was later able to salvage and re-post on T(n)VV in October 2016.  As it’s almost another seven years on, I’m going to re-post with just an occasional edit to cut down the number of words.

Debut is something that I first heard snippets of in a record shop while browsing. Being familiar with Sugarcubes, I recognised that Björk was singing, but my first assumption was that she was doing guest vocals for someone else. It was only after the third or fourth track in a row to feature her talents that I thought there was more to it, and this was confirmed by the ever-friendly indie-store sales assistant. He also told me that in the week or so since the CD had arrived in the shop it had been on very heavy rotation as it was that rare beast – i.e. an album that found favour with all four folk who worked in the shop.

I told him I was a fan of her former band – he replied that it was nothing at all like any of the old stuff. And he also offered me, as a well-known face in the shop who spent something in the region of £40 a week on CDs, a free copy over the weekend that I could bring back on Monday morning if I didn’t like it. And if I did…..well it would be added to my next bill.

I don’t know how many times the CD was played over the course of that Friday night, the Saturday and the Sunday, suffice to say that not many other things got a look in.

Debut is a record that shifts from one music genre to another with the greatest of ease, class and style  As such, it is impossible to get bored with it. It’s a combination of the songwriting genius of Ms Gudmunsdottir and magical production from Nellee Hooper (and no I haven’t forgotten that he also co-wrote at least half of the songs).

Thirty years on and it has not dated one bit whatsoever. It still makes me smile, makes me dance, and every now and again stops me in my tracks and makes me think about loved ones present and past.

It’s a truly remarkable piece of work.

It was an album that was a slow-burner, spending ages in the UK charts, but never getting any higher than #3. Four singles were taken from it, and, in a strange reversal from the norm, they reached progressively higher chart positions.   Human Behaviour got to #36 in June 1993. Venus As A Boy reached #29 in August, while Big Time Sensuality climbed to #17 on its release in November. However, in March 1994, Violently Happy launched its way to #13.

If you don’t own this record, do something about it.

mp3: Björk – Come To Me

JC

The traffic to the blog slows up over the Festive period, and it’s therefore something of an opportunity to take a bit of a breather.

Over a period of 26 days, I’ll be posting a single never previously featured on its own before – it might have sneaked in as part of an ICA or within a piece looking at various tracks – with the idea of an edited cut’n’paste from somewhere (most likely wiki) and then all the songs from either the vinyl or CD.

A is for Army Of Me, a song recorded by Björk for her second studio album Post.

The single was released in the United Kingdom on 24 April 1995 as a cassette and two-CD single. The first CD contained the Icelandic version of You’ve Been Flirting Again and the cave version of Cover Me, both from Post. The latter was recorded in a cave in the Bahamas, and sounds of flying bats can be heard in the background. The single also contained Sweet Intuition. The second CD contained, among other remixes, a version which features Skunk Anansie.

Army of Me was notable for the fact that, in contrast to the sweetness and lightness to be found on Debut, it features Björk making heavy use of screaming vocals.

Björk, in a contemporary press interview, explained what the song was about:-

It’s a song for the movie “Tank Girl”, but it is actually about my brother. He is pretty lazy and likes things like food, sex, sleep – very basic needs. It’s just that he does it more than others.

Then he started smoking, well, not cigarettes. It felt as if he was in a coma. He just sat on his butt complaining, “the worlds stinks, I can’t get a job, there are no good albums to buy and even if I wanted to buy them, I don’t have any money to buy them with. Blah blah blah.”

Self-pity from morning to night, which really pisses me off. You can stand a whining brother to a limit, but for ten years, from he was 14 to that he turned 24. I simply had enough. That’s it. Stand on your own legs, get a job, get a life. And if you complain once more, you’ll meet an “Army Of Me”.

mp3: Bjork – Army Of Me
mp3: Bjork – Cover Me (Cave version)
mp3: Bjork – You’ve Been Flirting Again (Icelandic Version)
mp3: Bjork – Sweet Intuition
mp3: Bjork – Army Of Me (ABA All-Stars Mix)
mp3: Bjork – Army Of Me (Masseymix)
mp3: Bjork – Army Of Me (featuring Skunk Anansie)
mp3: Bjork – Army Of Me (Instrumental ABA All-Stars Mix)

Army Of Me entered the UK singles chart at #10. Björk went on Top of The Pops and chose to offer up the Skunk Anansie version of the song. It’s one of the greatest moments in the history of the show.

It dropped to #21 the following week…..

JC (with thanks to Scottish Tee Vee for such a great quality clip)

Album : Debut – Björk
Review : NME, 3 July 1993
Author : Johnny Dee

LET’S ADMIT it, the Sugarcubes resided in a border town south of Obscure and just north of Wacky. They juddered and lurched like difficult children, throwing toys against walls, scratching non-existent itches. They were the Euro B-52’s. But there was, above everything, that voice, an alien screech that coughed up puffin feathers, cracked, screeched and soared like nothing you’d heard before.

Five years on and ‘Birthday’ still sounds ridiculously stark and extraordinary because of it. But, then, as you found yourself consumed by its strange beauty, in walked Einar The Irritant barking a bizarre psycho-babble rap, bringing even the most goo-goo eyed back down to earth with an ugly bump.

Is should, therefore, come as some relief to find Björk left to journey alone without the ideas of a group cluttering up the landscape. The surprise, though, is that she has fashioned an album as elaborate, unique and fresh as ‘Debut’. It’s hard not to bellyflop straight into the deep end, cry, “Album of the year, end of story”, and float off on a sea of hyperbole. ‘Debut’ takes you to strange, uncharted places. No group could make an album like this – too many ears to please. But, although this is very much Björk’s album (you get the impression that these are songs she’s carried in her mind, like secrets, for years), the contribution of producer Nellee Hooper is vital. The man behind Soul II Soul‘s symphonies, he has managed to throw manifold ideas into this exotic soup without making it sound cluttered and overdone.

With his involvement and Björk’s previous solo dalliance with 808 State it would be easy to assume she’s become a fully fledged house diva. Not so; ‘Debut’ may walk the same side of the street but it wanders into jazz, film soundtracks, pop too. Heck, there’s even a couple of songs Babs Streisand wouldn’t blink at covering. And then there’s the just plain weird (natch).

The first three tracks are built from hypnotic loops. On ‘Human Behaviour’ a swampy kettle drum jazz vibe circles around Björk’s rasping larynx, trying to find a melody but eventually settling for the search. ‘Crying’ swims on a niggling piano riff, while the wonderful ‘Venus As A Boy’ creates an Arabic mantra. Here, as on most of the album, the tonsil gymnastics are kept to a minimum, but it’s still a vastly disarming sound: a voice only a lifetime of Marlboro abuse or a guttural foreign language where people have names like Gudmundsdottir could create.

There’s a bonkers part in ‘There’s More To Life Than This’, though, where she sounds positively possessed. Allegedly recorded live in the Milk Bar toilets, a muffled house beat chunders away somewhere in the distance amid giggling chatter, then a door is closed and Björk is left to sing alone about nicking boats and sneaking off into the night. This woman is quite patently barmy.

But even this is ill preparation for ‘Like Someone In Love’. Accompanied only by 80-year-old harpist Corki Hale, it’s the kind of tearful ballad you’d expect to find in the sad interlude of some crackly old black and white Judy Garland film. More fun, madness and surprise follows – the pulsating grind of ‘Big Time Sensuality’ and ‘Violently Happy‘ plus the sweet unearthly breeze of ‘One Day’ which ripples along to baby gurgles and ambient fizzes.

This is an album that believes music can be magical and special. It will either puzzle you or pull you into its spell. And if you fall into the latter category, ‘Debut’ will make every other record you own seem flat, lifeless and dull by comparison.

mp3 : Björk – Venus As A Boy
mp3 : Björk – Like Somone In Love
mp3 : Björk – Big Time Sensuality

JC adds : Anyone who is familiar with my own past postings on this album will be more than aware that my thoughts very much echo those of Mr Dee.

There you go, the grumpiness from yesterday has been forgotten already.

 

“After The Sugarcubes, I guess I had a mixture of liberation and fear. It had been obvious for a while in the band that I had different tastes than the rest. That’s fair enough – there’s no such thing as correct taste. I wrote the melody for “Human Behaviour” as a kid. A lot of the melodies on Debut I wrote as a teenager and put aside because I was in punk bands and they weren’t punk. The lyric is almost like a child’s point of view….”

Nobody anticipated the sounds that Björk would bring to the party with her first solo material after The Sugarcubes had called it a day. There was a fair chance that it would be a touch different from the music she had made over the years with her band, but surely it was still going to be indie-schmindie with the emphasis still being on a traditional line-up of a guitar, bass and drum, with a flavouring of keyboards……so it was something of a shock to the system to hear this:-

mp3 : Björk – Human Behaviour

The single was released in June 1993. My first recollection of hearing it would have been at least a month later when I was browsing in a record shop I was known to frequent on a very regular basis (although to be more accurate, it should have been called a CD shop as about 90% of the stock was in that format), when my ears picked up that Björk was singing over what seemed to be an experimental trip-hop outfit. I hung around for a bit and found myself intrigued and enjoying the music, although I still wasn’t sure what was going on and whether it was a new record or was it something on which the chanteuse was guesting. A chat with the sales folk established that what was playing was an album, appropriately called Debut, which was the new material from Björk. I mentioned that I was a fan of her former band but was told that this was nothing like the old stuff, but in a good way. I was also, very kindly, offered the chance to take the CD home with me for free, on the proviso that I would return it after the weekend if I didn’t like it or pay for it the next time I dropped in. The cash was handed over a few days later………

I think I would have struggled if I had heard Human Behaviour in isolation – I certainly wouldn’t have forked out the money for what would have been an expensive single. It’s not the most commercial sounding piece of music and was from a genre of which I knew very little, albeit the stuff I had managed to pick up, such as Massive Attack, was finding favour…..but deep down, I was still an indie-boy at heart. It was only hearing it in the wider context of the album and taking the time to luxuriate in all that was coming out of the speakers that I was able to realise just how special the debut solo single had been.

Here’s the mixes that were made available on the 12″/CD singles:-

mp3 : Björk – Human Behaviour (Speedy J. Close To Human Mix)
mp3 : Björk – Human Behaviour (Underworld Mix)
mp3 : Björk – Human Behaviour (Dom T. Mix)
mp3 : Björk – Human Behaviour (Bassheads Edit)

All are at least six-and-a-bit minutes in length. The Underworld mix extends to over 12 minutes. They are all worthy of your considered attention.

JC

I’ve been lucky enough to be a guest contributor over at the ongoing series at When You Can’t Remember Anything in which S-WC and Badger run through 200 great songs. As indeed has The Robster who penned some wonderful words about Human Behaviour which then extended out into his thoughts on Debut:-

I remember when Human Behaviour came out (June 1993). I had been a massive fan of the Sugarcubes and Björk was, for me, the quirkiest pop star on the planet. I was gutted when they split as I had never managed to see them live, and let’s face it, three albums was simply not enough. You can imagine my excitement when I heard Björk was going solo and that within a year of the ‘Cubes break-up, her first single would be out.

I don’t know why, but I was expecting something very different to Human Behaviour, something – I dunno – more indie? The final Sugarcubes release was a brilliant album of remixes featuring some of the top producers of the time (Justin Robertson, Todd Terry, Marius deVries, etc) so I should have been prepared for something a little more electronic I suppose. But no, I heard Human Behaviour and my heart sunk.

I’ve come to like Human Behaviour quite a bit in the intervening years. Those timpani drums that echo throughout in time (and tune) with the bass make it sound all brooding and ominous. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in it, and it’s not all that electronic-sounding really. Some nice growling guitars, an understated rustling snare drum and, of course, Björk’s voice at the centre of it all. It’s masterfully put together, a great production by Nellee Hooper. In fact, it’s not unlike Massive Attack in places, probably for that reason.

The album – craftily-titled ‘Debut’, even though it was actually Björk’s second solo effort, following some 16 years after this [https://www.discogs.com/Bj%C3%B6rk-Gu%C3%B0mundsd%C3%B3ttir-Bj%C3%B6rk/master/1870] – sounds rather dated to these ears nowadays. Human Behaviour still stands up, probably because it is the least electronic track on it. I also still love Crying. But the trouble with electronic music is that it rarely stands the test of time, the sounds get left behind as the technology changes. A lot of ‘Debut’ suffers from that, I reckon.

Reading that led me to dig deep into the vaults of the few postings kicking around from the old blog and to offer this alternative view that I put up back in October 2009:-

I was an admirer of the music released by The Sugarcubes in as much that I bought singles and albums, but usually a few weeks or months after they had been released rather than on the day they hit the shops.

I was slightly sorry to learn of their break-up in 1992, and while I was interested to hear that their female lead singer was going to pursue a solo career I didn’t think it was one that would have a big impact outside of her native Iceland…….(glad I never put a bet on that one at the bookies)

This was another of the records that I first heard snippets of in a record shop while browsing. I recognised that Bjork was singing, but my first assumption was that she was doing guest vocals for someone else. It was only after the third or fourth track in row to feature her talents that I thought there was more to it, and this was confirmed by the ever-friendly indie-store sales assistant. He also told me that in the week or so since the CD had arrived in the shop it had been on very heavy rotation as it was that rare beast – ie an album that found favour with all four folk who worked in the shop.

I told him I was a fan of her former band – he replied that it was nothing at all like any of the old stuff. And he also offered me, as a well-known face in the shop who spent something in the region of £40 a week on CDs, a free copy over the weekend that I could bring back on Monday morning if I didn’t like it. And if I did…..well it would be added to my next bill.

I don’t know how many times the CD was played over the course of that Friday night, the Saturday and the Sunday, suffice to say that not many other things got a look in.

Debut is a record that shifts from one music genre to another with the greatest of ease, class and style (another record that I think does the same is Boat To Bolivia by Martin Stephenson & The Daintees). As such, it is impossible to get bored with it. It’s a combination of the songwriting genius of Ms Gudmunsdottir and magical production from Nellee Hooper (and no I haven’t forgotten that he also co-wrote at least half of the songs).

I listened to this album in its entirety again in the last hour, something I probably haven’t done in 10 or so years. It has not dated one bit whatsoever. It still made me smile, it made me dance and it stopped me in my tracks and made me think about loved ones present and past.

It’s a truly remarkable piece of work.

It was an album that was a slow-burner. It spent ages in the UK charts but never got any higher than #3. Four singles were taken from it, and in a strange reversal from the norm, they reached progressively higher chart positions, with the lead-off Human Behaviour hitting #36 in June 1993. Venus As A Boy touched #29 in August, while Big Time Sensuality climbed to #17 on its release in November. However, in March 1994, Violently Happy reached #13.

If you don’t own this record, do something about it.

So there you are.

Two contrasting views from bloggers whose tastes tend to be quite similar. Incidentally, I’m not saying I’m right and that The Robster is wrong….I just felt it was a good way of illustrating the diverse opinions that can exist and why the whole notion of simply liking or disliking a piece of music just because someone else has said something good or bad about it is utter bollocks.

It’s also why I believe anyone with a taste or passion for music should never be afraid to express their views and thoughts…..and if you want to do so via a guest posting on T(n)VV then don’t be slow at coming forward.

In the meantime……

mp3 : Bjork – Big Time Sensuality
mp3 : Bjork – Come To Me
mp3 : Bjork – Crying
mp3 : Bjork – Violently Happy (Fluke – Even Tempered Mix)

Enjoy

PS : Talking of WYCRA, word reaches me that Badger is on the mend after a wee bit of surgery.  It’s also likely that S-WC, having moved house and got his wi-fi up and running more quickly than he expected, may be posting again, if not today then in the near future.  It’s only been a few days but they have been missed.