Homogenic

Homogenic is the album where Björk stopped changing costume. September 1997, after Debut (1993) and Post (1995), made with Mark Bell of LFO and strings played by the Icelandic String Octet. Electronic rhythm and a small orchestra occupy the same bar. Neither is a guest. One Little Indian released it. The singles a general listener is most likely to have met — “Jóga,” “Bachelorette,” “Hunter,” “All Is Full of Love” — are doors into an album that is stricter than the singles’ fame suggests.

The strictness is the sound-world. Where Post had been willing to change costume every track, from big-band brass to industrial thud, Homogenic stays inside one climate. Beats are bright, hard, and close. Strings are not the pretty layer added to make the electronics respectable. They carry melody and they carry dread. “Jóga” is the clearest demonstration: a landscape song, written for a friend, in which the percussion keeps erupting under a string line that would have been enough for a film cue. Björk’s voice sits forward, Icelandic accent intact, words about emotional landscapes that the arrangement refuses to illustrate gently. Gentleness would have made it a nature documentary. The beats make it physical.

“Bachelorette” is the album’s most direct piece of theatre, a song that walks in already certain of its ending, strings marching, vocal in full command. “Unravel” is the opposite pressure, a ballad about love as a thread that comes undone, and it is the track that later singers kept returning to because the melody is generous and the arrangement leaves room. “All Is Full of Love,” which closed the album and later became a single with Chris Cunningham’s famous video of two machines kissing, is the afterimage: a lyric of total affection set to a rhythm that sounds like a factory trying to learn tenderness. “Pluto” is the other pole, a blast of speed, voice shredded by the processing. An album that can hold “Unravel” and “Pluto” without sounding like a compilation is an album with a spine.

Bell’s role matters to anyone trying to hear this as electronic music rather than as a pop star’s orchestral moment. LFO had come out of the early British rave years with a sense of bass as structure. On Homogenic that sense keeps the strings from floating off into prestige. The low end is blunt. The album was partly made away from London, after a frightening episode in which a fan sent a letter bomb; the move is part of the public story of the record and it matches the music’s desire for a smaller, harder set of materials. Iceland, in the sound, is the decision to use Icelandic players and to stop collecting genres.

The reputation that followed has sometimes stranded the album in “art” and away from the dance floor it actually understands. These are body rhythms. “Alarm Call” and “Hunter” are as close to club music as a song with this much melodic information can get without giving up the song. The critical mistake is to treat the orchestra as the serious part and the beats as the modern part. They are one idea: a human voice and an acoustic ensemble pushed through the same electronic pressure. That idea turned out to be one of the durable ones in the decades since, audible whenever a producer puts a string line against a drum machine and hopes the collision produces feeling rather than a trailer. Björk and Bell got there with the collision already finished, not hoped for.

For this magazine the album is a reference, not a mood board. Club Copy’s own pages keep separating melody from rhythm and then trying to put them back in one credit: Riscape’s piano against house time, LT Drifta’s jazz titles against beat lengths. Homogenic is the popular record that showed the reunion could be severe. It does not sound like those records. It shows why a listener who cares about one might care about the other. “Jóga” is the landscape. “Pluto” is the blast. An album that holds both has a spine, and the spine is Bell’s bass under the octet.