The elastic stretched so much it cracked. “What happened is that my expectations about romance were there, but what was really happening was here. “I used to have all these opinions about love, because I’m fierce, hopeless romantic,” Björk said at the time. It can also be found in music, a powerful connecting force. “Family was always our sacred mutual mission/Which you abandoned,” she sings in “Vulnicura’s” “Black Lake.” In “Homogenic’s” “5 Years,” she spits “I’m so bored of cowards/Who say they want, and then they can’t handle … you can’t handle love.” “Homogenic” exorcises that anger, reaching a furious climax on “Pluto,” in which Björk is reborn from a cocoon of volcanic techno-metal noise: “Excuse me, but I just need to explode … explode this body off me.” By the album’s end, resolution is reached in the form of “All Is Full of Love,” a soft, glowing track which reaches the liberating conclusion that even if individual loves fail, it doesn’t mean that love is a lie: it is all around, in many forms, though “maybe not from the sources you have poured yours.” Love can be family, friends, love of humanity, and the world. In “Homogenic,” as in “Vulnicura,” she confronts the realization that sometimes others cannot, or will not, live up to that credo. That song also bears a warning to a lover who doesn’t keep faith: “If you forget my name, you will go astray.” Björk’s earlier songs typically presented love as a brave, bold mission, a leap off a cliff into the unknown, part of the great adventure. She left no room for herself to be infantilised or dismissed on the likes of “Bachelorette,” which asserts its right to self-definition with a high-drama orchestral flounce: “I’m a fountain of blood/In the shape of girl.” At the same time, it was a forceful statement of identity, giving the lie to two-dimensional stereotypes of Björk as kooky, elfin pixie with a richly 3D soundworld that embodied her wide taste and her musicianship, from contemporary underground electronic sounds to lush string arrangements. Through those songs, recorded in a Spanish retreat, she worked her way from her rock bottom to the peak described in “Alarm Call”: “I want to go on a mountain top/With a radio and good batteries/And play a joyous tune/And free the human race from suffering.”“Homogenic” was a restatement of her belief in music, in life, and in love. Profoundly shocked, she briefly considered quitting music, she decided instead that “the best thing I could do would be to write more songs.” After his body was discovered and the bomb intercepted, Björk was besieged by paparazzi on her doorstep. Worse was to come: in autumn of 1996, Björk was knocked sideways by the suicide and attempt on her life of a troubled fan, Ricardo López, who bomb-rigged a letter to her, before shooting himself in the head on camera. “Debut” (1993) and “Post” (1995) had been both highly praised and heavily toured over an intense four years, so intense that she’d lost her voice. After moving from Reykjavik to London at the beginning of 1993, she’d dived into club culture, electronic music, unexpected fame, new collaborations and sounds. She had been further drained by an intense relationship with drum’n’bass pioneer Goldie, which had sputtered to an end despite rumors of impending marriage. Like “Vulnicura,” “Homogenic” followed bad times for Björk it’s a clear-eyed diamond of a record, forged in a pressured, tumultuous period where she hit, as she put it, “rock bottom.” Her relationship with her celebrity status was becoming increasingly fraught in February 1996, she’d snapped and attacked a reporter, Julie Kaufman, in Bangkok airport. This journey back into the light will travel in parallel with another Björk record: “Homogenic,” her third album, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last month. Next month, Björk will release her ninth record, “Utopia,” the love-lit flipside to 2015’s black-depths heartbreak album “Vulnicura.” Where the latter documented her passage through emotional purgatory, picking over in painful detail the breakdown of her marriage to Matthew Barney, “Utopia” will be a vision of “paradise,” a rediscovery of the endless renewal of love and life. Emily Mackay, the author of “Björk’s Homogenic (33 1/3),” details how Björk’s past albums led to the birth of “ Utopia.”
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