Björk: Fossora, album review — avant-garde influences and a sentimental streak

“Heart” is an overused word in pop music, but Björk’s unusual intonations breathe life into it on her new album. “Ha-ah-whht,” the Icelandic star sings at one point with a gentle susurration, as though the organ in question were deflating. Later in the same song it turns up again, this time with a flutter of rolled Rs like a rush of blood.

Other singers attempting similar feats of vocal idiosyncrasy might end up sounding affected or smug, flush with pride in their unusualness, like a Scrabble player getting a triple word score for “quirky”. But Björk always sounds unforced when she sings, even when swooping around notes as if the lines on the stave were monkey bars. She delivers her oddly tilted phrasings without artifice. She sings, in other words, from the heart.

The habit was learned from her mother, we learn on Fossora. “When I was a girl she sang for me/In falsetto lullabies with sincerity,” she remembers in “Ancestress”. An involving symphonic number with new-age wind-chime elements, it is one of two songs commemorating her hippy homeopath parent, who died in 2018. Other tracks are inspired by the natural world, romantic intoxication and female nurture. True to the only-connect message of opening track “Atopos”, these themes are linked by shared imagery and musical motifs.

Björk drives the album like a film auteur, having written, produced, programmed and arranged almost all its contents. Her rhapsodic imagination has a sentimental streak, which clashes with the dissonant, avant-garde influences in her music. But Fossora — the feminine version of the Latin word for digger — possesses a magnetism that its predecessor Utopia lacked.

“Atopos” snouts around like a large animal with a rude, clompy beat and the low, burrowing sounds of a clarinet ensemble. The clarinets return in “Victimhood” as a brooding counterpoint to Björk’s vocal, which gutters like a candle. The title track brokers an intriguing union between perky minimalist music and the headbanger tempo of gabba techno. What might be gimmickry in other hands comes across differently here: as curiosity and adventure, the heart-in-mouth quality of being willing to take a leap.

★★★★☆

‘Fossora’ is released by One Little Independent