(Herald rating: *)
Bjork's name might be on the tin but there isn't much of her voice on this side-step of an album. Recorded to accompany American artist boyfriend Matthew Barney's latest avant garde celluloid adventure, in which she appears, her second soundtrack manages to outdo the first - Selma
Songs for Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark - for sheer weirdness.
And if last year's acapella Medulla challenged long-time Bjork faithful, this one is likely to prove even more bewildering.
It does, of course, have its moments. Well, one, actually - the opening track, when guest vocalist Will Oldham sings a song based on letters sent by Japanese citizens to General Douglas MacArthur in 1946, thanking him for lifting a ban on Japanese whaling around Antarctica. The film apparently has a thing about whale and other delicacies and the Japanese fixation on them, hence Pearl begins with the sound of pearl divers hyperventilating before taking the plunge.
But what follows is an increasingly tedious mish-mash. Both Hunter Vessel and Vessel Shimenawa sound like a school brass band in a rampant improvisation on the Jaws theme. And Storm, with Bjork doing her best harpy vocal, is woozy enough to induce sea-sickness. Which actually might be the effect she was after.
Label: Polydor
