Cut to 1993, first library job of many and walking to work through the Carlton Gardens with what I wanted to be the next James Bond theme in my head. I'd switch stations just to catch it and I hadn't done that since studying for year 12 exams when I needed to hear Ashes to Ashes as much as possible. It was a big serious sound, a riff played on timpani drums with a hissing electro hi hat swishing behind it like a sprinkler system. And then the voice, same one as The Sugarcubes album, in great form, climbing into the rhythm like a pilot into a cockpit, quietly, assured, getting comfortable and then raging. "If you ever get close to a human ..." I couldn't shake it. The bursts of energy and dynamic control that let it reduce before the next wave with the big screech wailing over the crests and that constant grave rumble of the orchestral drums.
See, at thirty-one I thought I'd outgrown new music. The last thing I'd liked was My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and Swans' White Light at the Edge of Infinity. I was still resisting acid house and everything that came to be called EDM because that just wasn't my drug. All that sludgy pop locally and from the U.K. at the end of the '80s and into the '90s very quickly boiled down into homogeneous goo. None of those West Coast bands were getting through to me (I liked them later, sorta, as I'd already been fifteen and there was no rush at twice that). But this, this was doing something.
Holy! What a breath! After the barnstorming Human Behaviour we get the skittish and jazzy doof and clang of riffs and electrokicks. She sings of going around town, alone in a crowd, her voice quiet and intimate against the bold arrangement. And then the chorus kicks in and she's crying because she needs, cares for, feels you, a vocal line so tooled it would sound like a reed instrument were it not in the hard longing in the voice. At the end her desperation has her at this pitch in the verse and chorus alike. The mix of jaunty music and tough feeling will describe most of the rest of the album.
But that's the point, this first outing beyond the confines of a rock band saw Bjork cast a wide net past the fishing limits of rock music and find grooves to suit moods of any kind from any strain as long as they aren't from the exhausted well of rock music. As I listen again to that perfect sound of the CD I'm reminded of why post punk initially binned the 4/4 crunch of rock, however briefly. Just for a few big winters we got sounds from the outer reaches of dub, musique concrete, even further reaching into classical and hard bop. The vacation was a rich one, if not intended as a fun escape, and here, when the world again needed something like it, Bjork takes us somewhere like it. Now it's cheekily informed by the sounds of the clubs, of smoky jazz or funky soulful Hammond bites and bips. And a kind of updated Tiki comes forward, as organic as the island decor and as busy as the multitude of insect populations zapping and buzzing around.
Venus as a Boy lilts like a boat, clunking with Arabic fills on the strings and it's dreamy and sexy and floating. In wicked mode Bjork finds a companion at a party on the ordinary side and they flee to find their own fun out between the boats under the moon. At one point she opens a door and slams it shut so the dance thuds are muffled as she sharpens her invitation to archness. It's a gimmick but it works every time. "There's more to life than this," she winks and it's been arranged at the right time so what might have descended into backing vocals chanting that phrase. There's something like it but it's kept low in the mix as her voice soars above, never falling into cliche. The sounds of the partiers hub bubble through to the crossfade into what might be the side closer (but I've only ever known this as a CD or higher), her harp led languid cover of Like Someone in Love turns everything down to the 6 a.m. end of the night of the previous track. From breathy realisation to understanding in cool, full voice, she plays the scene to perfection.
What would have been the old side two introduces what comes across as the diary of a love story. It's a sandwich of belting numbers around a trilogy of love ballads and ends with a dreamy jazz coda. It's not announced in any way but there are clear indicators in the record's architecture that, instead of a standard side two of fillers and maybe another single, we get a legit song cycle.
Big Time Sensuality starts with a skittish jazz organ like something off In a Silent Way. This is set into a pumping electro kit. This should sound skeletal and would except for Bjork's vocal which comes in blazing: "I can feel something. It's about to happen. It's coming up". The melodic phrases are short and strengthened to bold major thirds. If you wanted to score this for an orchestra you'd have to have a brass section for this one vocal; its insistence and solidity would demand it. But this is Bjork who gave us some of the most adventurous vocal gymnastics since Yoko Ono, so, freed even from the outer edge of rock band conventionality with the Sugarcubes. She is giving us everything else that the spare arrangement cannot and it's as huge and excited as love at first sight.
One Day begins the trilogy of love and longing. A varispeed vocal which sounds like baby squeaks over a distant synth sequence. Bjork comes in with a bright vocal which climbs its melody from whimsy to full throated yearning. Light electronic orchestration supports the vocal, variously solid and airy. A trombone solo appears with a modal figure before Bjork cuts back in with the yearning "I can feel it" motif. She provides her own choir of distant backing: "one day, one daaay..." as though it's echoing through the landscape. The fade subsides with the trombone figure.
Aeroplane dives into an updated form of exotica, the fifties '50s and '60s lounge music by the likes of Martin Denny and Les Baxter. Your e-Mai Tai will be accompanied by clicking percussion, jungle sounds, bird calls, vibraphone and bubuhbaahs on the backing vocals while Bjork vocalises a notch above where she was on the previous track.
Come To Me seems to gather the previous two tracks and add a little. A bass figure with a buoyant echoing bass figure and synthesised steel guitar. The voodoo reef backing vocals are back. The vocal soars higher than both of the previous songs and lifts the song into clear passion. exotica and electronica blend and blur the boundaries as Bjork's voice seems to swim and then rise form the swell into a massive clear blue sky. "You know that I adore you. You know that I loooooooove you."
This trio of songs play a deft game of progressing from the last one and identifying with each other so closely that it's easy to remember a line from one as being part of another. I haven't tested this but they are probably in the same key and share a bpm. It's a song cycle rather than three songs on the second side of a record. The quality of each belies the musical skid row that the space in the overall sequence if reserved for.
Violently Happy closes the internal sequence with more experimentation. Bjork begins with a grand descending declaration: "Since I met you this small town hasn't got room for my big feelings". The pulsing rhythm swelling beneath is all first wave techno with an insistent throb. Bjork proceeds to demonstrate that you can have all the doof doof of acid house and what was yet to be called EDM and still have a clear ranging organic centre to it. Her muscular vocal is the equivalent of the feeling of the best dancing you think you've ever done while you're still doing it. It's an affirmation of all the longing, devotional secular prayers of the rest of the cycle from Big Time Sensuality and it sounds like an ecstatic surrender.
Instead of closing there, though, the album ends with a complex harmonic jazz chorus of saxophones with Bjork more quietly affirming the simple contentment of a way of living that promises adventure yet offers constant comfort. It's not all cosy, those saxes are really working the dissonance underneath the dreamy lines about diving and weighing anchor. She's home, happy and alive.
This was my first CD. I didn't even have a CD player. They were beyond my means on a part time job. I had to choose between having a player or having something to play when I got it. Also, the record was new and there was a thrill in making this my first. I could wait for the player while I slowly built up my home stereo after the death of the three in one I'd inherited from Nanna in the '70s. I'd seen the discs up close before so the newness was a little curbed but still this was special.
If the square of cover art was greatly shrunken from an old LP the designers had been clever enough to maximise the portrait of Bjork on the cover. It's monochrome but tinted with the greyish olive hue that dominates the rest of the artwork. Bjork, head to chest, with straggly hair that makes her look fresh from the shower or an all-nighter in Reykjavik, looks out quietly from behind an arch of hands flattened together, not in prayer but more like the anticipation of someone else's reaction. This is what I've come up with. Hope you like it. The extra comforable cashmere jumper is in contrast to the tiny offputting dots on the lower eyelashes which give off the sense of rave culture or something more sci-fi. There is neither artist name nor album title.
On the rear cover in a plain font Debut. Outgunning it massively from beneath is her name with alien lettering, a slanting oval and a triple umlaut over the name's sole vowel. Even smaller than the album title, the tracklist slants backwards; numbers, titles and running times. This might not be the first time for this but the phenomenon in the '90s and '00s of music acts bringing in their tracks in at around the same length is on display here. Was that in response to the excesses of the '70s and '80s? Maybe but I think it has a lot more to do with the twin forces of songcraft and danceability. Acknowledgments inside and more sci-fi design with a wide ribbed wall that could be out of Alien or A Space Odyssey. Inside the case, the disc was matt black, the artist name's off-world font repeated from the back cover.
I taped it at a friend's place. Another visitor thought I was strange for making the decision to get the music before the player even though I was demonstrating in front of her why that wasn't going to be a problem. The tape was only ever temporary and I knew I'd get more discs soon enough and when a better job came up all would be ready. There was that extra thrill of the change of decade and modus vivendi, too. I wouldn't have a home computer for another year and then it wouldn't be hooked up to the world. I affected a coolness about this, assuring friends that I did all my surfing at work and left it at the door while I still read books and played tapes at home like a Luddite. Really, I just wanted everything upgraded and faster and better and everything the new tech offered. Meanwhile I tapped away at short fiction (even won a local contest with a story which afforded me a futon - '90s).
But the thing I really luxuriated in was a return to the excitement of getting the real version of that good moment on the radio when something grabs at you from the speakers and holds on tight. I walked to work for a whole year with the serious orchestral drumming of Human Behaviour pounding in my memory. And now, here it was, in full thumping glory. And there was the rest, the tiny textures the arrangements that stretched from arch bebop to doofing sweatfests. And all, each and every one of them, were songs. It was there on TV with the videos by Michele Gondry for the singles. Boy did she know the right people.
Well, she hung in the right crowds. Most of the production is by Nellee Hooper, a maven of Bristol's Wild Bunch along with Tricky and the gang who'd soon form as Massive Attack. At her insistence, he brought the acid house into the studio to meet her songs. And it scrubbed and whined and barked to life around the voice that had thrilled us so well in front of the Sugarcubes but, now, free of the rock band, against a big canvas of new, soared into the clouds or fell back to just beside our ears to console, whisper and taunt.
What I did know is that, over the speedbump of thirty, I needed no more rock music in my ears, at least for a while. That's why I got around to the Nirvanas and Soundgardens later as, for all the talent there, they just sounded regressive. It wasn't necessarily that I wanted progressive, I just didn't want the repackaged old. This album gathered everything I wanted to know more about in contemporary music. I was still young enough for the clubs and went to parties where you really could zone out and take the music in. So it wasn't just me getting creaky and gravitating to the jazz cellar. Rock wasn't too loud for me, then, it was too creaky and done. This, with its perfect playability over three decades (I have the DVD-A, as well but listened to the CD for this first) gives me a nostalgia that has less to do with grief for dead hours than a reacquaintance with the joy I still feel on hearing it.
What I didn't know was that Bjork's Debut formed the best inroad imaginable to the strain I did follow in that decade, the one just around the corner that, like the best passing trends, like psychedelia or punk or ambient, it sounded of its time but never got old: trip hop. This wasn't that, that was still being invented in the clubs of Bristol, but this felt as fresh, as sexy and as creepy, as right time and night time as My Funny Valentine, Blue Monday, or Baby it's Cold Outside. Three decades on and it's still as fresh as this morning's coffee.
Listening notes: Yes, I did put the old CD on to hear this again. Still sounds exactly as it should. I also lay down in front of the DVD-Audio I bought some time in the '00s and heard it again in big spacey surround with a woofer for those doofs and timpani. That one also has a few of the videos that Michel Gondry at al made for the singles which bring big smiles.
