Bjoerk's Homogenic

Description

In recent years, Bjoerk's artistry has become ever more ambitious and ever more respected. With the release of her conceptual app-album Biophilia in 2011, and a huge retrospective exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art coinciding with her most recent album, Vulnicura, in 2015, her status as artpop auteur has been secured. The album that made all this possible, though is 1997's Homogenic, a turning point in Bjoerk's career and still among her finest musical achievements. Produced under great strain, it moves beyond the stylistic magpie rush of Debut and the urbanophile future-pop of Post, to something darker, stronger and braver, full of dramatic assertions of independence, sharp, stuttering beats, rich strings and raw outbursts of noise. It created, as the Alexander McQueen designed sleeve clearly asserted, a new Bjoerk, one who would never stop hunting.

Emily Mackay is a freelance writer and editor based in Southend-on-Sea, UK. In her career, she has been to a party at Prince's house, ordered out of a car at gunpoint by the LAPD and helped Thurston Moore steal a sofa. Her favourite though, was being driven around Reykjavik by Bjoerk in her Landrover.

Positively bursting at the seams with information and fresh insight, Emily Mackay's 'Homogenic' is perhaps the pick of the bunch [of all 33 1/3s in 2017], a continually entertaining reading of one of Bjoerk's most vital, enduring albums ... As Bjoerk primers go, this is certainly one of the best. * CLASH * A scholarly but thoroughly readable analysis ... Strongest of all are the in-depth dissections of Homogenic's heady blend of patriotism and cosmopolitanism, the traditional and tech savvy, nature and technology. * Record Collector *