In one of the year’s most surprising developments, Industrial Revelation will be covering Icelandic singer/songwriter/producer Björk’s third album, Homogenic, in its entirety on December 20 at the Neptune. Released in 1997, Homogenic is a richly orchestrated electronic song suite that stuffs 10 pounds of fraught emotions into a five-pound bag. It’s the record on which Björk became really serious.
Homogenic contains two career peaks: the jaggedly funky “Alarm Call” (augmented by some of the most buoyant “oohhs” ever put to tape) and the infinitely ascending helix of joy that is “All Is Full of Love.” Beyond those, the record finds Björk and her phalanx of producers—Mark Broom, Howie B, Guy Sigsworth, Markus Dravs—combining orchestral strings with rarefied electronic textures and beats that don’t want to make you dance so much as they assert the singer’s idiosyncratic conception of rhythm as a metaphor for her tumultuous inner life.
