Blindspotting: Björk, "Post"
Bork! Bork! Bork!

The Legacy: Björk (or Ms. Guðmundsdóttir if you're nasty) achieved worldwide fame as the lead singer for Icelandic college-rock darlings the Sugarcubes in the late '80s, but that band wasn't her first rodeo; in fact, she released her first album when she was all of 11 years old. By the time she officially embarked on a solo career in the early '90s, she was in her late 20s, but had been making music professionally for much of her life — which probably has at least something to do with how confidently she strode into mononymous recording artist status, and how little she seemed to care that her music tended to prove bewitching and confounding in equal measure. After testing the waters with 1993's willfully eclectic (and rapturously received) Debut, Björk went all in for the follow-up — she's described Post as "musically promiscuous" and "spastic," both of which are fairly apt for an album that swoops and spins between house and big band with beguiling abandon. Because it was the '90s, Björk's willingness to indulge her every experimental whim was rewarded with no small amount of commercial fanfare: Post ended up selling around three million copies worldwide and went Top 40 on the U.S. album charts, cementing her status as one of the most fearless — and consistently brilliant — singer-songwriters of her generation.
First Impressions: If you've been hanging out with me long enough, it should come as no surprise that I rejected Björk's shtick out of hand from the beginning. I was aware of the Sugarcubes, but only dimly; I heard enough of their stuff to feel confident it wasn't for me, and continued to hold that assumption after she launched her solo career. By the time she started showing up for awards shows dressed as a goddamn swan, my antipathy had calcified into an immovable object.
A lot of this had to do with the feeling that the majority of Björk's creative deal boiled down to weirdness for weirdness' sake, which struck me as not only annoyingly performative, but a waste of everyone's time. Having now listened to Post for an entire day, I'm not ready to completely let go of that knee-jerk assessment, but on the other hand... this shit rules.
Post begins with "Army of Me," which is the perfect gateway drug for first-time Björk listeners; it doesn't want for the willfully odd choices that serve as the essential framework for her career, but it's also impossible to deny as a song that kicks ass. With its vaguely doomy, electronic-laced sound — which incorporates a sample of Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" — it serves as a mission statement for the album as a whole by crushing digital bits into the analog paste that binds them. It's an impressive opener, but I'd argue that it pales in comparison to "Hyperballad," a genuinely heartbreaking number that contains some of the record's most purely affecting vocals, all in service of lyrics that brilliantly contrast the darkest human impulses with the joy and comfort of love.
By the time we get to "The Modern Things," which posits that all the comforts of 20th-century living were always "waiting in a mountain for the right moment" while "listening to the irritating noises of dinosaurs and people dabbling outside," Björk has asserted her creative control so completely that she can spend three minutes soulfully belting lyrics in Icelandic without losing a single iota of her grip on the listener. And then from there it's off to the record's signature hit (at least in the U.S.), her cover of "It's Oh So Quiet," released by Betty Hutton in 1951. It's different from much of the rest of the record in that it lacks techno touches, but at this point, it makes perfect sense in the context of the colorful sonic quilt Björk has assembled, which contains so many multitudes that she could have carted in Tuvan monks without anybody blinking an eye.
I could keep going with a song-by-song review of Post, but I'd rather just cut to the chase and get to the real point for this writeup, which is to publicly say I was wrong for refusing to add Björk to my musical diet. I've been warned that this is her most accessible work, so I'm fully aware I may not have much use for anything else in the catalog, but fuck it; I'm fully in the bag for Post, and look forward to hearing the rest for myself.
Favorite Song: I'm picking "I Miss You," a brightly colored swirl of jittery programmed beats, vaguely Arabic droning, and brass charts that evoke Afro-Cuban dance songs. Fittingly, it includes some of Björk's most gutturally unhinged vocals on the album; the end result reminds me a little of David Byrne's "Hanging Upside Down," which does some of the same things, albeit with more of an emotional remove.