FEATURE:
The Modern Things
Björk’s Post at Thirty
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ONE of my favourite albums…
of the 1990s turns thirty soon. On 13th June, 1995, Björk’s Post was released. Ahead of its anniversary, I want to explore the album in more detail. Even though many associate it with songs like Army of Me and Possibly Maybe, there is so much more to Post. A work with no filler. Many argue that it is Björk’s finest album. Though I would put it in the top three, I can see why people think it is her finest moment! Similar stylistically to 1993’s Debut, Björk wanted Post to be a more extroverted collection of songs, featuring a broader range of genres and sounds – including Electronic, Dance, Techno, Trip-Hop, IDM, and House. Björk produced Post herself with co-producers including Nellee Hooper, Graham Massey and Tricky. I am going to start with a feature from Albumism. They wrote about Post for its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2020:
“Debut is about expression. Intimate. Isolated. Looking out. It’s counterpoint, 1995’s follow-up Post is more focused on exploration.
Having moved from the natural landscapes of Iceland into the bustling and confronting big city appetite of London, Björk’s second LP is very much an album of “after.” It is the sound of discovery and journey. Less looking out as an astute anthropological observer, and more living out, getting in amongst it. Exposing oneself to the world and letting the world expose itself in return.
Initial sessions recorded in the Bahamas yielded a sense of freedom for Björk as she crafted her tones with a sense of joy. Here she and collaborators let sounds shape the songs and let access to their surroundings influence the feel of several efforts. Rumors abound the vocals were recorded on the edge of beaches, singing into the sea, and dug from the depths of caves. All very plausible and all very Björk, who was never going to be your average singer-songwriter.
Returning to London to flesh out the album, Björk pulled in more collaborators to help add warmth and greater musicality to the collection that was very stark and heavily beat-driven. The result is an album that is, as Björk herself puts it, “musically promiscuous” with songs not only cross-pollinating genres within the flow of the album, but within the very fiber of the songs themselves.
Opening with the plodding heaviness of “Army of Me” Björk sets to shatter any expectations the listener may have. Menacing and mechanical, “Army of Me” is strangely motivational with its “get your shit together” sensibilities. Melding trip-hop with industrial and bubbling techno with eerie horn flourishes and skittish synth runs, the track is a sonic feast that emboldens the listener with every bar. And Björk delivers a powerful, near raspy vocal that grabs you from the first line.
The spell cast by “Army of Me” doesn’t let up for the remaining forty plus minutes of the album. With “Hyperballad”—one of the most twistedly romantic songs ever dedicated to wax—Björk offers some self-care tips to surviving one’s need of self and sharing space with another. She describes how each morning before her lover wakes, she climbs to the top of a mountain and throws things off in a sense of cleansing and survival. It’s wild and lovely all at once. A sense of self and sacrifice. With a constantly propulsive beat that shutters along, little melodic blips and blops wind their way to the pounding energy of the chorus where Björk’s vocals take that leap off the mountain and soar around before coming back to earth. “Hyperballad” has to go down as one of Björk’s greatest moments on record and without a doubt, it’s one of the most exciting songs of the ‘90s.
All the bluster is stripped bare for the moving “The Modern Thing” that lets Björk’s vocals swirl and wind their way through expression as they soothe one moment and explode in the next. Lyrically, Björk ponders if all of life’s great inventions have always existed, just waiting to be (metaphorically) dug up and discovered.
Whilst the unexpected should be expected with Björk, few would have predicted a soft shoe shuffle into big band with a cover of a relative obscure B-side by Betty Hutton. But “It’s Oh So Quiet” not only works, but it does so with pure abandon. As the last track recorded for Post, it’s inclusion was meant to shake things up for the listener, but it would also do the same for the artist with its accompanying life-in-technicolor video catapulting Björk into the pop mainstream.
Balancing out the pop sensibilities of “Quiet,” the following track “Enjoy” delves into the darker side of things with a stalking beat and near threatening horn stabs as Björk gives into her most lust-filled desires. Its prickly and grating, and delightfully satisfying. It’s the kind of song you could see Trent Reznor aching to cover.
With “Isobel,” Björk retreats to the forest in a semi-autobiographical telling of a clash between modern living and nature. Backed with lush string arrangements, “Isobel” is an enchanting listen that is sensual and comforting set against a series of rolling tribal inspired percussion. As Björk’s vocal expressions are so idiosyncratic, it makes sense that they’re the main focus of your listening experience. But a song like “Isobel” also displays her ability to layer lush beds of backing vocals that wrap around you like a warm hug.
A sense of solace and haunting is present in “Possibly Maybe” with its hypnotic slow melody and trip-hop inspired back beat. It’s a slow unwinding of defenses and letting go of any hope. Although it is ultimately a song of heartache, the arrangement makes it comforting.
From heartache to hope, Björk takes us on a trippy mix of Zydeco and Afro-Cuban inspiration with “I Miss You” that unfolds on the listener in a joyous way akin to rolling down a long hill in sunshine. There’s an impatience in the music that reflects the lyrical turn as Björk sings, “I Miss You / But I Haven’t Met You Yet.”
“Cover Me” is a stripped back moment of revealing admiration that skews any sense of structure with a wicked smile.
The album closer “Headphones” is, as the title suggests, best experienced with said devices in place. Like a guided meditation, Björk is a sonic tour guide talking through a real time creation of sound. Aided (and inspired) by Tricky, the track is a perfect representation of Björk as avant-garde artist. And the perfect reminder of the many jewels to be uncovered in subsequent albums”
I am moving to a feature from Treblezine. I know there will be new inspection and investigation of Post ahead of its anniversary on 13th June. I remember the album when it came out in 1995. Although I was not a huge Björk fan at the time, in years since, I have really come to love all of her albums. Post is right up there with the best. A step on from her 1993 debut, new generations of fans have discovered this album. It still sounds like nothing else:
“An account I don’t quite remember, from an ostensibly less cretinous version of Twitter that no longer quite exists, once shared a long string of emojis: a woman, a mountain, a cloud, a wheel, a bottle, a knife, a fork, rocks, etc. The only explanation given: Björk.
It takes a minute or so to see the link—it’s a deeper cut than a woman and a swan, for instance—but the imagery is drawn from “Hyperballad,” a standout song from Björk’s sophomore album Post. In its narrative, Björk imagines herself ascending a mountain while her partner is asleep, and undergoes a ritual of purging, walking up to the precipice and hurling objects off the edge, “Like car parts, bottles and cutlery.” It’s almost absurd to imagine, this person quietly rising in the stillness of dawn for the sake of throwing heaps of garbage into an abyss. But the resolution is one of security and well-being, confessing that she pushes herself to fling projectiles into the void, “So I can feel happier/To feel safe with you.”
It speaks volumes about Björk’s unconventional vision truly that such a peculiar piece of songwriting can be so recognizable even in nonverbal form. “Hyperballad” was only a minor hit, reaching number one on the Billboard Dance Club chart but coming nowhere near the Hot 100, yet it’s become a signature song for the singular Icelandic artist, a moment in which disparate, even contradictory instincts all come together in unlikely, rapturous harmony, an honest and vulnerable core wrapped in orchestral techno armor.
By age 29, when Post was released, Björk had already experienced something on the order of a half-dozen careers in music. In her early twenties she fronted The Sugarcubes, releasing her first all-time great song with 1988’s “Birthday” and subsequently opening for U2 a few years later. A visit to the Icelandic Punk Museum in Reykjavik, converted from a former public bathroom, further details her early post-punk years as a teenager in bands like Tappi Tíkarrass and KUKL. Even her debut album, Debut, was—technically speaking—her third, following a folk-pop album she made as a child and a seldom-heard jazz record she made in 1990 between Sugarcubes records.
It makes perfect sense that Björk recorded and released Post just before turning 30, an age when energy, fearlessness and confidence all seem to intersect.
Her actual but not literal debut, Debut, however, lived up to the importance of its title by delivering on the promise of Björk’s arrival as a solo artist. The 1993 album saw Björk immersing herself in the sounds of trip-hop and house music, collaborating with producer Nellee Hooper on a set of beat-driven songs heavily inspired by the music she’d been hearing in clubs, as well as records by Brian Eno, Kate Bush and artists on the Warp Records roster. Bearing little to no resemblance to any of Björk’s prior projects or releases, it offered up one of the most significant of many reinventions throughout her four-decade career.
Post, released two years later, presented a more extensive exploration of Björk’s artistic impulses and internal self. It’s an album that juxtaposes big sounds with contrastingly vulnerable emotions, a reflection of her new surroundings after relocating to London, looking beyond the club—either rock or discotheque—and probing a vast, chromatic and aural palette while somehow finding a way to unite its most contradictory sounds and distant points through a kind of sly introspection. Björk described the album as being her most “promiscuous,” in part because of how she brought so many different collaborators into her unique vision: Tricky, Howie B, 808 State’s Graham Massey, Brazilian composer and arranger Eumir Deodato and so on. Perhaps more accurately it’s a reflection of the many aspects of her own identity: defiant, complex, somehow both insular and extroverted. The entirety of Björk, both as an artist and as an individual, can be heard on Post.
As a 15-plus-year veteran of the music industry at just under 30 years old, Björk’s abilities were never in doubt. But perhaps more than anything, Post reinforced the uniqueness of her perspective. We perhaps take for granted that the aesthetic and stylistic hybrids on Post—merging trip-hop with orchestration, pop with industrial, avant garde electronic music with a more mainstream-friendly approach to songwriting—which came to be the norm in both alternative music and even well beyond that sphere in the years that followed. Still, there weren’t many songs prior to this album—by anyone—that sounded much like “Army of Me,” a buzzing industrial stomp backed by a John Bonham drum loop that saw the petite Icelander laying down the law with intimidating fury: “And if you complain once more/You’ll meet an army of me.”
Where “Army of Me” outfitted Björk in battle armor, the ambient twinkle of “Possibly Maybe” lays bare her vulnerability, her daydreams of unrequited love turning to bitterness: “After a while I wonder/Where’s that love you promised me?” And in the grimy, sweaty grind of “Enjoy,” she attempts to reconcile physical attraction with self-conciousness, an effort to be in the moment (“sex without touching” is the phrase she uses, but you get the sense that, yes, there will be some touching involved).
The broader musical palette that Björk draws from likewise allows her to explore a more complete range of emotions beyond big-time sensuality, though there’s no question that there’s plenty of that to go around. On the brief “Cover Me,” in which Björk recorded her vocals in a cave during recording sessions at Nassau’s Compass Point Studios (after what was then a recent renovation and reopening of the temporarily shuttered hideaway), she sings, “I’m going hunting for mysteries.” By and large, she finds them, frequently wrapped in idiosyncratic stylistic choices and haunting arrangements. Teeming with bright bursts of horns and hypnotic layers of percussion, “I Miss You” imagines an ideal partner that might not even exist, playfully accompanied by an animated video in which her head is bitten off by piranhas. Meanwhile, the left-field hit “It’s Oh So Quiet” is an update of a 1951 Betty Hutton vocal jazz song that hits reset at the halfway point, its brassy sound and punctuations of unfiltered screams a startling attempt to shock the audience, and the bane of karaoke DJs worldwide”.
Before finishing off with the influence and legacy of Post, there is a review that I want to get to. A five-star review from Slant Magazine, their praise and huge applause mirrored reviews from 1995 and those since. A huge chart success and an album that is seen as one of the best of all time by many sources, it still sounds fresh and exciting thirty years later. An album that has not dated at all. For anyone who has never heard the album, I would urge them to do so. It is a genius album from one of music’s true innovators:
“Though Björk had enjoyed minor cult fame as the lead singer of the prog-punk band the Sugarcubes, it only took one solo album to solidify the Icelandic artist as a viable pop iconoclast. The plainly titled Debut and its accompanying music videos showcased the endlessly fascinating sides to Björk’s offbeat persona: sweater-clad explorer (“Human Behaviour”), bejeweled sensualist-egg chef (“Venus as a Boy”), lovesick insane asylum inmate (“Violently Happy”), and, perhaps most intriguingly, trailer-hitch improvisational performance artist (“Big Time Sensuality”). All four of the album’s singles tickled the fancies of pop fans who secretly wished pop iconography would take more dangerous, sensual leaps of intuition: Björk, through sheer force of will, seemed as experimental and frightening as her pop ditties were cute and ingenuous.
Then, of course, there was her voice: She could rarely be bothered to sing in the 4/4 time signature dance music often requires, and her paradoxically husky and reedy, thickly accented vocal tone could sound at turns childlike and tremulous or like a shriek from the crypt of banshees. But Debut, for all its sense of independent self-actualization, is honestly as much an achievement by producer extraordinaire Nellee Hooper as it is a reflection of Björk’s titanic character. Her 1995 follow-up, Post, upped the ante by plugging listeners into the diverse pop mixtape playing inside her mind, and if she had to go suss out producers as sundry as Graham Massey and Tricky to achieve her goals, then so be it.
It’s telling that Post includes two tracks initially slated for Debut and then scrapped when they seemed too far out at the time: “The Modern Things,” reportedly a response to rockist fans of the Sugarcubes who cried “sellout” when Björk learned to love the computer sequencer, and the opening track “Army of Me.” Right from the word go, Post is several furloughs beyond any of Debut’s perceived weirdness, as “Army of Me” provocatively merges a Weather Report-esque jazz-fusion bass riff with a heavy-timbered rock drumbeat to match her contemptuous vocal delivery (“Self-sufficience, please!”). Without missing a beat, Björk puts herself into the role of fragile suicidist on “Hyper-Ballad,” as she throws tchotchkes over a cliff to approximate the nature of her own plunge. A phenomenal journey, the track begins with lightly shuffling drum n’ bass before expanding into an immense house groove.
“It’s Oh So Quiet,” an instrumentally faithful cover of a 1940s Betty Hutton big band number, was Björk’s biggest crossover moment ever, and if it’s usually rejected by most Björkheads, well, then that’s another testament to the extent she implores people to open up their musical horizons. Each track on Post reveals another emotional extreme: “Possibly Maybe,” an almost masturbatory ode to the wax and wane of love affairs; “Enjoy,” a dark and dubby dalliance with the seedier side of sexuality; and “I Miss You,” which should resonate with anyone familiar with the “Amor Omnia” speech in Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud. And in case some odd ducks still hadn’t caught on to Björk’s lost-in-a-costume-shop approach to public guises, Post came fully equipped with another barrage of music videos (six of the little buggers!), many of which have gone on to become classics, most notably Michel Gondry’s industrial wasteland “Army of Me” and Spike Jonze’s clodhopping tribute to Busby Berkeley and Jacques Demy, “It’s Oh So Quiet.”
Collaboration has always been an important aspect of Björk’s work ethic. Testifying to this is the fact that she has had romantic affairs with a great many of her colleagues (Tricky, Stephane Sednaoui…though probably not Lars von Trier). She also suggested that the Post remix album, Telegram, is, if anything, even more true to her personal vision than the prototype, despite having an even wider range of styles and producers (a shrieking, classical Brodsky Quartet “Hyper-Ballad” mingles with a distorted, NIN-like “Possibly Maybe” and a ghetto-blasting hip-hop “I Miss You”).
For many, the delicate balance of Post represented the ultimate Björkian pop experience, and one that has yet to be topped. In fact, Björk’s next album, her 1997 glass-dragon Homogenic, indicated with one fell swoop that Björk had moved beyond pop into what one might call her own cloistered “genre of me.” The shimmering Vespertine, from 2001, suggested a move on Björk’s part to translate her own unique musical style back into the world of pop (with some fantastically emotional moments like “Undo” and “It’s Not Up to You”), but Post will likely always remain the Björk album that most successfully sustains her winning balance of experimental whimsy and solid pop magic”.
I am going to end with some information from Wikipedia. In terms of the legacy and influence of Post, it has had such an impact through the years. Not just in terms of affecting other artists. How significant it was in Björk’s career. Rather than repeating her debut, Post took her music to new places. When she followed Post with 1997’s Homogenic, again, Björk evolved once more:
“The album's influence has been identified as being increasingly palpable on the contemporary music landscape, and later reviews of the album also make note of the timeless aspect of the music. Writing for The Daily Review, James Rose wrote in 2015: "Post is where mainstream music could have gone. While modern chart music hasn't gone there entirely[,] she undoubtedly helped broaden the playing field. [The album] stands today as a body of work that still informs the more marginal artistic fringes of modern music and reminds us how narrow and staid our world would be without outliers like Björk. Also in 2015, Andrew Shaw of Nerdist felt that Post "chose to ignore expectation, market restrictions, and contemporary trends", and that Björk "pushed her vocal performances into new places, where no other vocalists could dare to sing". He compared the album's impact on audiences to that of Jimi Hendrix's 1967 album, Are You Experienced, writing it "set the benchmark for what was possible when you take tradition and set it on fire". Raymond Ang of The Wall Street Journal considered Post to be "Björk's last stab at the pop game… she would dig deeper into her increasingly avant-garde interests and, in the years to come, thrill and challenge her audience".
David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors is an admirer of the record, stating he was influenced by Björk's deconstruction of classic melodies. American singer-songwriter Amy Lee has said Post is "one of the biggest records in [her] life". DJ Shadow sampled "Possibly Maybe" in "Mutual Slump", a track off his 1996 album, Endtroducing...... The Vitamin String Quartet—known for its series of tribute albums to rock and pop acts—covered "Army of Me" and "You've Been Flirting Again" in the 2001 album, Ice: The String Tribute to Björk. In 2008, Stereogum released a compilation of cover versions in homage to the album, titled Enjoyed: A Tribute to Björk's Post. It features: Dirty Projectors, Liars, Xiu Xiu, High Places and Atlas Sound, among other artists.
Much of Post's six music videos have gone on to become classics—most notably "It's Oh So Quiet" and "Army of Me". At the time of its release, music videos were beginning to be used as an art form, and Björk's visual output during this period—and her career in general—have become a clear example of the medium's artistic legitimation. Spanish writer Estíbaliz Pérez Asperilla has identified recurring motifs and themes through Björk's videography; these include nature and a magnified depiction of Björk. Surrealism and technology have also been identified as recurring features in Björk's visual output of this period. David Ehrlich of Time Out considered her "one of the first artists to meaningfully explore the aesthetic and semiotic value of CG and its relationship to the [videos]." Writing for Paste, Alexa Carrasco felt, "Björk has created some of the most beautiful and weird videos to ever play on MTV." The popularity of the music video for "It's Oh So Quiet" made the song one of Björk's most ubiquitous tracks, and was considered her first breakthrough on MTV. The music videos—and the pink boots Björk wears in "Hyperballad" (the work of Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck)—were displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, as part of the 2015 Björk exhibition. They were also featured in the 2016 exhibition, Björk Digital, which premiered at Carriageworks as part of the Vivid Sydney festival”.
I am going to finish there. On 13th June, the incredible Post turns thirty. One of the defining albums of the 1990s, as I said, it still sounds so fresh. You can put it on now and find new layers and details. Testament to the incredible production and the phenomenal songwriting. Björk performances so electric and stunning. I am not sure if there is going to be a thirtieth anniversary reissue of Post. However, you can grab it on cassette, C.D. and vinyl, so I would suggest you go and get it. This album holds a very special place…
IN my heart.