Homogenic

Ten tracks in about forty-three minutes, and the subtractive test finds little slack in the first half. Hunter must open: it sets the march, the strings and the self that goes out alone. Jóga is the landscape argument made sound, Bachelorette the drama, and Pluto the eruption that All Is Full of Love requires, since the calm of the close means nothing without it. The test bites in the second half. Immature is slight, a self-reproach that restates in a thinner palette what 5 Years and Unravel carry, and could go with small loss. Alarm Call is a change of light before Pluto, but it is the weakest song and runs long for what it does. All Neon Like holds its trance a little past need. Two soft places and one long one hold the figure.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: feeling has the scale and violence of landscape, and a woman’s love is not a plea but a sovereignty, given and withdrawn on her own terms. Jóga sets it as “emotional landscapes” and a “state of emergency”: love as a geological event. 5 Years turns the love song into an indictment of a lover’s cowardice, “I dare you”. Bachelorette gives a woman who calls herself a “fountain of blood”, wanting and dangerous. All Is Full of Love discloses the other pole, that love is there once one stops demanding it. The sound discloses as fully as the words, and is credited so. What holds it lowest of the eleven is that the disclosure is a condition of feeling, rendered more than articulated; the social and human condition beyond the lover and the self is barely touched.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Height is frequent and of more than one kind. Jóga is the summit: string chords held like geology, the beat breaking in beneath them, the voice rising on the chorus over both, grandeur and dread at once. Bachelorette rises in a dramatic, almost operatic way, the strings swinging and the voice climbing to its peak. Hunter builds by insistence, the snare figure tightening under the strings. Unravel is beauty, quiet and near-still. Pluto is terror and exhilaration, the voice screaming over distortion. All Is Full of Love is the hush after, soft and sustained. Six or seven of ten tracks rise. What holds the figure below Kind of Blue’s 9.1 is two level tracks, Immature and Alarm Call, and All Neon Like, which glows more than it rises.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth is evoked often and built in one pattern: the land as a body, erupting and then at rest. The sequence carries it. The record opens on Hunter, a figure as old as myth, the one who goes out alone; it passes through Jóga, where feeling is tectonic; it reaches Pluto, named for the god of the underworld, an eruption in which the self must “have to explode”; and it ends in All Is Full of Love, a waking into a world made new. Death and rebirth by fire is load-bearing in the order. Bachelorette, its words written with Sjón, adds a figure out of saga. What holds it below the bar: the frame is carried by titles and sound more than by a figure who bears it, and the land is Iceland only by the maker’s account, not by anything named in the songs.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance is Björk’s own: the bright eclecticism of Debut and Post, house, big band, trip hop and show tune, each record a magpie’s room; beside it Bristol trip hop’s strings over breakbeats, and the British electronic dance music of Warp and of LFO, Mark Bell’s group. The turn is real. She gave up the eclecticism that had made her famous for a single fixed palette, and joined the acoustic string ensemble and the abrasive programmed beat as one idiom, neither ornament to the other. The stake was a record with fewer obvious singles, harder textures and no pop centre. What holds it near the bar is the path: strings over beats had been placed by Massive Attack, and Bell’s language was proven at Warp. A narrowing and a fusion more than a new language, below Low’s 8.9, where the stake was larger.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, for the knowledge is in the palette. A record that says feeling is landscape, old and violent at once, is built from strings that hold like ground and beats that crack beneath them, with the voice the only thing that crosses between. Played by a band, these songs would be love songs; here the lover’s quarrel sounds as weather and rock. The sequence is counted here, once: the four string-led tracks give the land, the second half moves through glitter, accusation and lightness to the eruption of Pluto, and All Is Full of Love is the aftermath, its quiet a consequence. The form enacts the meaning on most tracks. Immature and Alarm Call are containers more than instruments, and the second half’s middle is looser than the first, which holds it short of Low’s 9.0.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over twenty-nine years, real and bounded. The record has been reheard and rewritten by its maker: her later work, from Vespertine to Vulnicura, keeps returning to its pairing of strings and programmed sound, and she restaged it on tour with a string octet. Jóga and All Is Full of Love have been studied as much through their videos, Michel Gondry’s and Chris Cunningham’s, as as tracks, which is evidence of yield but partly of the videos’ yield. On return the record repays in arrangement: the string voicings under Jóga and Bachelorette, the beat’s relation to the strings, the placing of the voice. Semantically the yield is narrower. The words are few and recurrent, and Immature and Alarm Call are exhausted early. The depth is formal more than semantic, and that holds the figure.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The field is art pop and electronic music of the late 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the orchestral string ensemble and the glitched, distorted electronic beat could be one body rather than a sample laid over a loop, that a pop album could be built on that fusion without a drum kit, and that the voice could be the one organic element between them. That reorganises a small part of the field, audibly here before her later records. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the art pop that joins strings and electronics in the following decades runs through her work as a whole more than through this record singly, and the reach of the All Is Full of Love video is the video’s. The reach is real and diffuse, and its attribution to the maker rather than the record is the discount.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print, remastered and reissued on vinyl, and heard as an album. Presence is continuous and wide among musicians and critics, steady on the lists by which the period is remembered, with Jóga and All Is Full of Love in broadcast and use; it is narrower among the general public, and popularity would not be proof in any case. The fabric bears its year in part: the distorted beats of Pluto and 5 Years are sounds of late-1990s electronic music, while the strings and the voice are fixed to no year, and the mix has dated less than most records of 1997. Presence wide but not widest, and the beats’ date, set the figure at the bar and not above it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium is high and in places load-bearing. The voice is the record’s first instrument: its range from the near-whisper of Unravel to the scream of Pluto, its control of breath and attack on Jóga and Bachelorette, its placing close and dry over the strings. The string writing is idiomatic and economical, long chords in Jóga, rhythmic and dramatic in Bachelorette, and the octet sounds an octet, not a pad. Bell’s programming is exact, the beats set under the strings without swallowing them; the low end of Jóga is the record’s signature, a sound that is the content. Read against the elder records, not above them: Immature is thinly made, Alarm Call generic in its bright production, and Pluto’s distortion is effect more than construction. Below Low’s 9.0, level with Remain in Light’s 8.7.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the record: the land and its fracture, strings and beats under one voice. Take the two most distant elements, Unravel and Pluto: the first a near-still ballad of a lover’s absence, the second three minutes of distorted techno and a scream. They obey the same law, as quiet ground and eruption, and the sequence places them as such. Bachelorette and All Neon Like, the most orchestral and the most electronic of the slow tracks, share the palette and the voice. The range is moderate, not narrow: march, ballad, dramatic waltz, trance, techno, pop. The law loosens at Alarm Call, whose brightness obeys the palette but not the argument, and the record’s coherence is helped by the narrowness of its palette, which counts for nothing as coherence. That holds the figure.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, as desire, anger, self-reproach and calm. The couple is held in several states: the plea and the absence of Unravel, the indictment of 5 Years, the claim of Bachelorette. The natural order is held, by sound more than by word, in the land the strings and beats make; the nation is present only as that land, by the maker’s account. Technology enters as the medium and, at the close, as a world in which love is general. The sacred is glimpsed in the rebirth of the close. The family, labour, the state and history are absent, and the community beyond the couple barely appears. One consciousness joins what is held, and few orders are held: that is what sets the figure lowest, below Low’s 7.2.

Score: 7.0 / 10