Bjork's Post At 20

Baby, who knows what’s going to happen. Lottery or car crash . . . or you’ll join a cult.

It’s difficult to believe, but Björk’s Post came out twenty years ago next week, on the 16th of June, 1995. It landed three years after her unexpected smash Debut, which had netted Björk a Brit award and robust sales on both sides of the Atlantic.

For me, I think Björk captured the zeitgeist of the era (at least in the West) better than any other artist, that bleeding edge of the dot com boom, characterized by a fast-recovering economy and the promise of an Internet-based techno utopia. It was music to read Wired magazine and Microserfs by, or that you listened to while coding your first homepage in HTML. Post was optimistic without being stupid, mechanical without being soulless, robotic without being emotionless. Indeed, the more you listened, the deeper it seemed to become.

Even Madonna had become a public devotee, recording Björk’s “Bedtime Stories” and going so far as to name her 1994 comeback album after the track (Madge would become a Euro techno queen herself on 1998’s Ray of Light, the best album of her career and one that owes much of its musical and lyrical style to Björk). But Post rapidly pushed beyond the infectious dance/pop which had captured Madonna’s attention on Debut – it didn’t just have avant-garde elements, many tracks essentially were avant-garde.



The record starts off conventionally enough – for Björk anyhow – with the driving, menacing “Army Of Me”, not a million miles removed from Debut’s lead single “Human Behavior”, although more overtly industrial (this was the era of Nine Inch Nails, after all). But it’s on Post’s second track where Björk truly punches thru to a new level with maybe the finest single of the decade, the achingly beautiful, sweepingly electronic, lyrically chilling “Hyper-ballad”:

It's real early morning
No-one is awake
I'm back at my cliff
Still throwing things off
I listen to the sounds they make
On their way down
I follow with my eyes 'till they crash
I imagine what my body would sound like
Slamming against those rocks

And when it lands
Will my eyes
Be closed or open?

Debut had been a wild but solidly fun ride. “Hyper-ballad” was even more thrilling, but it was abundantly clear from the lyric that Post would be venturing into considerably darker territory.

The techno-jazzy hip-hop of “The Modern Things” follows, owing perhaps a bit to the mainstream (even Madonna had experimented with merging jazz and hip-hop on Erotica’s “Secret Garden”, and so-called “chill” music quickly became a thing in the early ‘90s), but Björk brings to the table here her own surreal lyric sensibility and melodic sense. And of course, the perfect thing to follow “chill” music with is a straight-ahead big band cover of a Betty Hutton tune, “It’s Oh So Quiet”, whose signature video improbably propelled the track to #4 on the UK charts (still her biggest hit there). There was a growing rediscovery of the great American songbook among younger listeners in the ‘90s, but Björk was unique in having such massive commercial success with such an unlikely, forgotten gem from another era.



Somehow, perhaps because it’s all anchored by Björk’s unique vocals, Post manages to shift seamlessly from genre to genre on a dime. “Enjoy” is another menacing, industrial track, probably even closer to “Human Behavior” in sound and feel than “Army Of Me” was, but heavier on the samples. The use of samplers had been confined to ripping off old James Brown records for going on a decade, but on Post Björk brought back the kind of sonic collages that had characterized the early sampler era in the mid-‘80s, as realized by acts like Art of Noise. It’s a direction she’d go even deeper into on the subsequent Homogenic.

The spare “You’ve Been Flirting Again” follows, just Björk’s childlike voice and strings. This is Post’s emotional spine, successfully grounding and perhaps subtly recasting the preceding tracks. But the record doesn’t linger in that spare, emotionally naked space, and the lush, driving, dramatic “Isobel” would have been the highlight of any record that didn’t contain “Hyper-ballad”. A lot of electronic music sounds almost instantly dated, but virtually nothing about Post has aged – maybe the hip-hop flourishes of “The Modern Things” are a bit time-locked, but not in a tacky way. “Isobel” would be just as breathtaking if it were released today, and would still sound ahead of its time.

The album takes another spacey chill break with “Possibly Maybe”, anchored by the electronic telephone ringing sound that opens the track. Lyrically this is one of the most concrete, involved cuts on the record, detailing a relationship that’s probably over, but possibly not. The whole thing is eminently quotable, including the bit I opened this retrospective with, and also the final verse:

since we broke up
i'm using lipstick again
i suck my tongue
in remembrance of you

Post now takes a curious turn. We get an uptempo track, which is perhaps predictable – to a degree the record has been alternating hard/soft straight thru – but “I Miss You” almost plays like a fusion of everything that’s come before on the record. It’s by turns spare, raucous, jazzy and frantic, like someone took “It’s Oh So Quiet”, “You’ve Been Flirting Again” and “Army Of Me”, threw them into a blender and served up the results. The lyrics are purely Björk of course – she’s missing the perfect lover she hasn’t met yet – and the video is a surreal masterpiece directed by John Kricfalusi of Ren & Stimpy fame.



But it's in its conclusion that Post makes perhaps its most surprising turn, ending on an increasingly spare and ethereal note. First there's the the harp-driven “Cover Me”, an ode to Björk’s experimentation, which is followed by the even more skeletal - but solidly electronic - “Headphones”, an ode to the magic of the mixtape:

i like this resonance
it elevates me
i don't recognize myself
this is very interesting

And indeed, Post was very interesting. The final Björk album before dynamic range compression spread thru the music industry like Ebola and crushed the life out of music, it operates in a sonic environment where there’s room for quiet as well as loud – a great deal of quiet, in fact. And yet it’s unpredictable and engrossing enough that the sparsest track (“Headphones”) is able to hold your attention at least as well as the loudest (“Army Of Me”). As the old perfume commercial said, if you want to capture someone’s attention, whisper.

For me personally, listening to Post will always bring back memories of my trip out to San Francisco in the summer of ’95, when I came to rent an apartment here a couple of weeks prior to my move away from Arizona. Superficially San Francisco was a sunny and surreal place - a playground full of infinite personal and professional promise - but not unlike Post, it turns out there was more than a little darkness lurking right beneath that shiny new surface.

 

A great album by all means.

And the video for "I Miss You" is just crazy fun.

 

hyperballad is amazing...her lyrics are better and evoke more feeling than most people who speak english.

headphones gives pink floyd a ride for their money. so trippy.

 

20????? Already? How did that freaking happen!?!?

Love it as much now as I did then. (Which is a lot, BTW).

 

Bjork is how I discovered this board. Thank you doll.

 

I had the same reaction earlier this week when I realized Post was twenty years old next week.

Landmark album in my life. Lots of things in transition at the time at the time, really became an adult and struck out on my own away from my family. Did that already to some degree going to college about a decade before that, and getting my first "real" job 5 years before, but Post is one of two albums that'll always evoke that first year away from my hometown, and it always triggers recollections of the very start of it.

The second album is Bowie's Diamond Dogs, which is the first of the Ryko editions I picked up. I listened to that non-stop thru my first freezing cold winter in San Francisco in a dark, chilly, cramped little studio apartment with a malfunctioning radiator. And it was as perfect a bookmark for the end of that year as Post had been for the start of it.

 

How to acquire this on vinyl? Has anyone tried these new reissues? Unfortunately on colored vinyl... Will they also appear on regular vinyl?
Greetings, Tim

http://store.acousticsounds.com/d/103398/Bjork-Post-Vinyl_Record

 

Don't forget some wonderful b-sides, excellent remixes and the fantastic live album too, when thinking of Post (in addition to the album itself and the videos, most of which were magnificent).

Best of the Post b-sides:
Sweet Intuition
Charlene
I Go Humble
Sweet Sweet Intuition
Visur Vatnsenda-Rósu
Karvel

 

You could add " My Spine " to the list since it was also a leftover used on Telegram, an okay but flawed remix collection from this era.

The Post Live and accompanying live DVD (Shephards Bush?) are also worthwhile!

 

Listening to it right now! It's good, innit.

 

The new coloured vinyl is not great by all accounts - bit noisy and poor artwork..

The DMM releases from 2008 is the way to go if you can find them.. http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threa...ering-worth-it-for-new-bjork-reissues.157356/

 

I have the recent pink vinyl reissue. It works but doesn't give the music it's miracle feel. Other than that I'm happy I have it on vinyl.

 

Post is probably Bjork's most accessible album, there's really not a bad track on there. This is the album that really made her name.

 

All vinyl is colored.

 

Oh yeah, i forgot to mention the Shephards Bush DVD. Excellent stuff.

As for My Spine, it was omitted from my list consciously. Never been a big fan, to be honest.

 

Stereogum has a great article up: Post Turns 20.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought this was an important anniversary.

One thing I strongly disagree with from the Stereogum article:

"Other than the way it helped us get to know Björk, it’s hard to call Post an influential album, exactly."

Couldn't disagree more. Post was massively influential. Bjork brought the avant-garde solidly into electronic dance music and definitely brought artistic cred - boatloads of it - to techno. You couldn't dismiss synth-based acts as musically talentless anymore. Well, you could, but you'd look like a f*****g ***** doing it. I think without Bjork you might not have gotten the decade-plus long explosion of EDM. I can't see Madonna having teamed up with William Orbit to release a record like Ray Of Light without Post having been such a monster (for such an odd record). And I've gotta think all the subsequent producers out there deconstructing hooks and beats from the mid-'90s forward were at least a little if not a lot influenced by Bjork.

 

Post is a fantastic album and one my all-time favourites. Hard to believe it's been 20 years!

One point I have to correct you on:

Madonna --artist, label mogul and music enthusiast-- liked Björk's Debut and was working with Nellee Hooper as a result of his work with Björk (along with a multitude of other producers primarily in the r&b/hip-hop community that she appreciated at the time). Björk, a pseudo-labelmate of Madonna's, gave Hooper a song they were working on together for the Post album called "Sweet Intuition" (later included as the b-side of Post lead single and Tank Girl soundtrack release "Army Of Me" and even later remixed as "Sweet Sweet Intuition" for later singles) as a favour to Hooper. Released the year before Post, Madonna's "Bedtime Story" altered the structure of "Sweet Intuition" and further developed the song. The "sweet intuition" refrain was completely stripped and Madonna came up with the "let's get unconscious honey" chorus . This chorus would later prove controversial when radio programmers assumed she was singing "let's get unconscious ON E". Anyway, noting the lullaby-ish quality many of the songs on her 1994 release possessed (and perhaps wanting to innocently distance herself a bit from the sexually charged Erotica era), Madonna titled the project Bedtime Stories and gave what was formerly "Sweet Intuition" the singular, non-appearing title of "Bedtime StorY".



Which brings us to Ray Of Light, which was informed not by Post but by Madonna's love of the electronic music scene ("euro techno" as you call it) of the time, including artists like Massive Attack (with whom she'd collaborated in 1995 for the Marvin Gaye tribute Inner City Blues), Robert Miles and her label's own Prodigy. While Björk's Post album was a fairly straightforward techno release with the odd showtune thrown in for contrast (see also: everything by the Sugarcubes and the odd release Gling-Gló), Madonna's Ray Of Light melts some elements of that sound with her own proven and distinctive pop sensibilities, and expands on those ideas with flourishes of Middle Eastern, rock, classical and even Rice/Lloyd-Webber Evita influences for good measure. Björk's own 1997 release Homogenic is a better example of a successor, and is still entirely different and largely off the mark.

Björk benefited more from the Madonna association than the other way around, but regardless, good music is good music and all of the above are excellent works by talented and creative artists!

 

Here's a behind the scenes photo from the album cover shoot:



(Peep the title card... it looks like the album may have initially been titled Póstal or P
óstul.)

 

... and three more from the final shoot:

 

Official Post book I used to drool over at the record store but could never warrant purchasing:

 

Get this woman some medical help, pronto.

 

Hmmm. Dunno if I fully agree with all that. At the time I chalked Ray Of Light up to the William Orbit influence, plus a dash of Madonna's Middle Eastern studies - we'd already seen that crop up in the "Bedtime Stories" video some years before. But I just happen to have been listening to Ray Of Light (thanks to the forum's recent Madonna best-of polls) and Post back-to-back this week, and I heard some pretty solid (and surprising - I hadn't noticed them before) connections between the two, from Madonna's caterwauling vocals on the title track (which don't exactly sound like Bjork, but certainly possess the same spirit as Bjork, the kind of full-force, cut-loose and let it all out performance that Madonna had never demonstrated before) to the orchestration on "Frozen", which I was surprised to hear isn't a million miles from "Isobel". Her vocals there are overtly Bjork-like as well, although subdued. "Frozen" also has just an incredible video - the closest Madonna ever came to becoming a goth.

"Frozen" was an amazing single. I recall around that time Annie Lennox and Natalie Merchant were both flogging new records, and both of them cited "Frozen" as a track they were impressed by. I think Tori Amos might have noted it as well during an interview.

 

Wow! That's really awesome! I've never seen that before.

 

One of my favorite albums ever, by any artist of any genre.

 

It has been many years since I saw it, but IIRC the Shepherds show started quietly (Headphones?) and then Army of Me came next with a thunderous explosion. I remember being blown away by it!