my expectations with bjork have been dramatically lowered over the last fifteen years, to the point that i'll consider this a successful release if i deduce it's worth listening to a second time.

it's starting off relatively well. let's see where it goes.

i'm at track two, and this currently sounds like every other time that bjork has tried to be serious since vespertine, which wouldn't be such a tragedy if it were more dynamic. it's less that it's the same thing over and over again, and more that it's the same meandering aimlessness, yet again.

i caught the mt zion sample. did you?

i'm going to let this play, because it's bjork and i can still enjoy what is really brutal stagnation from her on a kind of basic level. and, i might listen to it a second time, too. but, she really needs somebody to challenge her, to take her out of these patterns she's built up around herself, to smash whatever mental chains are keeping her running on the spot and prevent her from going over what is really the same song over and over and over.

the second half of the record seems to be a lot stronger than the first half.

yeah, this isn't fundamentally flawed the way that vulnicra was, in the sense of the arrangements being so ultimately haphazard - i know vulnicra sounds complicated, but it's complicated in the way that throwing a lot of buckets of paint at a wall is, rather than the way that organizing it into patterns is: vulnicra had a lot of paint in it, but it didn't produce much of a picture. i get that the idea of the record is mostly vocal, and you can listen to it, but only from that intellectual distance. and, bjork works best when she's got you by the heart.

this record is definitely much more composed.

but, i'm not yet convinced that it's as compelling as medulla.