Björk – “Vulnicura”

There’s a simple question I like to ask myself when listening to an album for the first time: “Could someone else have made this?” About 99% of the time, the answer is “yes” — maybe someone else wouldn’t have made literally the same album with all the same choices, but they could have easily approximated it by finding the right influences and adopting a sound that’s been done before. That doesn’t mean it’s bad necessarily, just that it isn’t really breaking new ground (because that’s hard to do), and as a result it’s hard to be blown away by it. The albums that really make me love music are in the 1% “no” category, and have some level of personality or artistry that makes them completely unique.

The reason for my well-documented obsession/fascination with Björk is that she scores very highly on this test. Every Björk album sounds unlike anything else ever made, including artists who consciously tried to sound like her. I also enjoy statistical oddities, and I’ve started to think of Björk in these terms — as an artist, she is an outlier. Her combination of creativity and incredible natural vocal ability puts her on a musical island, where there are no real comparisons except to herself, as illustrated by this box-and-whisker plot. (I’m not entirely sure if I did this right because I haven’t taken a math class since high school.)

Björk’s latest album, Vulnicura, is what she calls a “complete heartbreak album,” and it details the dissolution of her long-time partnership with artist Matthew Barney in chronological order. The first six songs are labeled with a time period relative to the breakup (such as “9 months before”), with the first three taking place before and the next three taking place after. In this great Pitchfork interview, she expressed fear that this concept was too “boring and predictable,” but the simplicity of it ends up being a source of Vulnicura‘s power. In the last few years, Björk has made fascinating conceptual albums — Biophilia was a science-filled ode to the natural world, Medulla an audacious a capella album — that sometimes got a bit too brainy for their own good. Vulnicura‘s story helps it find that crucial heart/brain balance that Björk did better than anyone on her classic albums Post and Homogenic.

The honesty of Vulnicura is what really makes it a stunning listen. It’s not like other music is dishonest necessarily, but this album takes it to a near-uncomfortable level — Björk spares no details, and the subject matter inevitably gets brutally sad as her relationship evaporates. This peaks with “Black Lake,” the 10-minute post-breakup centerpiece of the album, in which she describes her “soul torn apart” and broken spirit. The chronological concept of Vulnicura really pays off, as it makes the album into a story, and the mood of the songs shifts as the relationship progresses. Opening song “Stonemilker” is a majestic, orchestral track that wouldn’t sound out of place on Homogenic, and portrays the first seeds of discontent as she demands “emotional respect.” Things get progressively darker from there, as she tells the story of their last night together, the aftermath of the breakup, and the effect it had on herself and the rest of her family.

All of this sadness, along with the lengthy songs and the fact that it’s Björk, has already led to Vulnicura being branded as one of those ordeal albums that is a chore to listen to. At least part of what makes it so affecting is that Björk has created such a connection with her fans over the years, and I’ve always thought of her music as this Utopian idea that crosses genre, language, and geographical barriers. That makes it difficult to listen to her reach what seems to be a rock-bottom emotionally. That said, I also found myself inspired by the openness of the album, especially given her celebrity stature — this was not an album that she needed to make to prove herself. Rather, it seems like something she just had to make for the sake of emotional catharsis, which Vulnicura certainly provides. On the closing track, “Quicksand,” she states a possible moral of the album: “when we’re broken, we are whole, and when we’re whole, we are broken.”

Vulnicura really reaffirmed what I am always looking for in music. The whole reason I listen to it, talk about it, and write stupid posts about it is for albums like this, that are able to express emotions and make you feel things in a way that other media simply couldn’t. It’s an album for people who still want music that has intellectual and emotional depth, that challenges you, demands your attention, and makes you think. And there is only one person who could have made it. Vulnicura may be bleak and difficult, but it is also a triumph.

Algebra Suicide

With so much music writing on the internet now, it has become harder for me to discover bands that really get me excited. Most of the new bands have already been written about endlessly by a million different websites, which makes it impossible for me to build an authentic connection to the music. And the older bands that are deemed “important” and fit into established music narratives are often mythologized in a way that instantly turns me off from them, because I hate it when people tell me what I should like and how I should perceive something before I even get a chance to experience it myself. The sweet spot, I’ve found, is the older bands that aren’t really talked about anymore, usually because they don’t quite fit into a convenient narrative about the era they performed in and/or didn’t have the level of acclaim to be considered Important Music. The reasons these bands aren’t considered important are why I end up liking them so much: they’re not being cited as an influence and emulated endlessly by people today, which often means they made weird, less mainstream music in a style that hasn’t been diluted (yet) by the works of other inferior bands.

One of these bands that I’ve been into lately since randomly hearing them on a radio show is Algebra Suicide, a husband/wife duo of Don Hedeker and Lydia Tomkiw. They performed from the late 80s-mid 90s and built a small following before the couple got divorced in 1993 and the band broke up in 1995. It doesn’t sound like they ever made much money or got much critical acclaim, but I think their music is really cool, and it conveniently has a couple traits that I’ve been obsessed with lately. The biggest one is that the band doesn’t have a traditional singer — instead, Tomkiw reads her poetry over Hedeker’s guitar riffs and a drum machine.

This talking instead of straight-up singing thing has been an ongoing fascination for me — two of my favorite songs last year, Courtney Barnett’s “Avant Gardener” and Magik Markers’ “American Sphinx Face” had this kind of style, and a lot of my older artists I enjoy like Life Without Buildings, The Fall, Patti Smith, and Laurie Anderson (who is the most obvious and frequent comparison to Algebra Suicide) can be grouped into the talk-singing “genre.” I think a lot of the appeal for me is that there’s something inherently daring about talking instead of singing. The lyrics and emotion of the vocalist can’t hide behind a catchy melody or impressive vocal acrobatics — in every Algebra Suicide song, Tomkiw is basically talking directly to the listener, daring them to form an opinion on her.

In the absence of traditional singing, talk-singers need to find other ways to express emotion and character, either through their words or the way they say their words. Some of them, like Sue Tompkins and Mark E. Smith, have a ton of energy and cram in as many words as possible, which suits their more free-wheeling, rambling lyrical styles. Tomkiw falls on the opposite end of that spectrum: her delivery is very deadpan, almost lethargic, and her poetry isn’t particularly wordy, instead relying on short, clipped phrasing and a thick Midwestern accent that adds a lot of color to her lyrics. Hedeker backs that up with a similarly simple approach, matching her words with repetitious guitar parts and drum machine beats. Algebra Suicide follows this formula on every song in the absence of traditional verses, choruses, or hooks.

The danger of this kind of band is that their songs could all start to sound alike and blur together when you listen to an album of them. Algebra Suicide avoids this mostly due to Tomkiw’s skill as a poet. I find there to be a very noticeable difference between a poet who is singing and a singer who thinks they’re a poet, and Tomkiw is definitely in the former category. Her lyrics are a significant cut above typical pop music lyrics that always make me think the band was just sitting around with a rhyming dictionary, trying to get the whole writing process over with. A good example is my favorite song by the band, “Heat Wave,” which has really vivid imagery describing a hot boring day in the city.

Algebra Suicide released a handful of albums, though I’ve found most of them impossible to find. Miraculously, “The Secret Like Crazy,” a 1988 compilation of their early singles and other unreleased songs, is available on streaming services. It contains their most well-known songs and worked well for me as an introduction to the band’s style. I also found a blog that compiled all of Lydia Tomkiw’s lyrics, which is a really useful resource that also doubles as a book of excellent poetry.

2013 Favorites: Throwing Muses – “Purgatory/Paradise”

I think everyone interested in music should watch this portion of an interview with Kristin Hersh, which explains some of her thoughts on the music industry and Purgatory/Paradise, the first new Throwing Muses album in ten years. Among my favorite quotes: “Now Throwing Muses is in the studio again, making, I swear, the best record of our career because there’s nobody telling us that we’re supposed to suck” and “I don’t want to expand my audience; I want to refine it.” Purgatory/Paradise is definitely created with the latter idea in mind: the album also comes with a 64-page book that includes track-by-track commentary from Hersh and drummer Dave Narcizo along with photos of the band, making it literally seem like a gift to the band’s longtime listeners (who helped fund the project using Hersh’s CASH Music organization).

Like many bands before them, Throwing Muses have released what you could call a comeback album, with all the fears and reservations that term entails. But in an age full of half-assed reunions and nostalgia-based cash-ins, what makes Purgatory/Paradise so great is that it always looks forward — with nobody telling them they’re supposed to suck, the band is free to make some of the most original and exciting music of their careers. There are echos of their previous work throughout (along with Hersh’s music as a solo artist), but a lot of it is entirely new territory.

Purgatory/Paradise is immediately distinctive from other Throwing Muses albums (and other albums in general) because of its structure. Its 67-minute run time is sprawled over 32 tracks, many of which are under two minutes long, including several that resemble individual songs or ideas split into two parts, which Hersh likened to someone hammering the record with a mallet. Melodies quickly come and go, then suddenly return later in the album like a ghost that is haunting you. In some cases, like “Sleepwalking 1” and “Sleepwalking 2,” the second part appears before the first part. Connections between these two-parters vary: some feel like extensions of the first song, while others feel like re-imaginings that are thematically linked. This really excited the music nerd in me, who likes stuff like album sequencing and construction — playing this album on shuffle doesn’t really work, because the pieces are meant to come and go at such specific times. It also made Purgatory/Paradise one of the albums I got lost in most this year, as I attempted to piece together its fractured puzzle with each listen.

My favorite two-parter is probably “Morning Birds,” which comes roaring out of the gate in the first part with classic early-90s Throwing Muses guitar pop before shifting into an atmospheric acoustic coda that is one of the album’s most beautiful moments. A few tracks later, the acoustic part picks up again in “Morning Birds 2.” Purgatory/Paradise really feels like a career-spanning effort by the band, and these songs show the full range of styles and emotions they’ve picked up over the years.

Amid all the shattered fragments, Purgatory/Paradise does make room for traditional pop songs. “Sunray Venus” shows a rougher side of the band with an intense vocal by Hersch, while “Opiates” displays their more subdued side. “Slippershell” is the band at their most dynamic, with quiet verses exploding into a noisy chorus. Hersch’s lyrics are as cryptic as ever, which makes it hard to try to pin any specific interpretation on these songs — sometimes I like music that does that instead of trying to hit you over the head with a specific meaning.

I’ve always considered Throwing Muses to be one of the very few bands that is truly original, in part because Hersh’s voice (her literal singing voice and authorial voice) is so different from what I typically hear in music. So it’s not too surprising that Purgatory/Paradise is an album that looked and sounded like nothing else in 2013. The surprising part, for me anyway, was just how good it was — it has instantly become my favorite release by the band since 1991’s The Real Ramona, and it’s one of the few albums this year I felt really passionate about. I find it really inspirational when a band in Throwing Muses’ position chooses to continue pushing the boundaries of their art when they could easily feel content with what they’ve done in the past. While it is really geared towards people who already like the band, I hope people who haven’t heard them still give Purgatory/Paradise a shot — this is an album that deserves to be heard.