A couple of years ago, I wrote myself only one New Year’s resolution: to dethrone Bjork as the “world’s most eccentric celebrity” (as she had just been named by some media outlet or another).

Obviously, I didn’t succeed; I’m not sure it’s even possible. Iceland’s favorite combination musical ambassador and sonic terrorist was pretty bizarre even before she started dressing like waterfowl at awards shows. But there’s a sense in which that was the problem: Bjork had gotten so weird, so willfully obtuse, that there was some question as to where she could possibly go next. 2004’s Medulla, a fourteen-track album pieced together almost entirely of vocal samples and packaged with deliberately unreadable liner notes (black type on a slightly different black paper) seemed like the logical conclusion of Bjork’s career. I loved the thing, but I also couldn’t figure out what she could do for an encore. It seems like she had something of the same problem, given that all she’s done in the past almost three years is the soundtrack to Drawing Restraint 9.

On Volta, what Bjork finally decides to do is pull back from the sonics of Medulla and look to her past for inspiration. “Wanderlust,” for instance, could easily have been on Post, and despite the fact that the remainder of the album doesn’t have quite that level of similarity, it’s still composed using that sound as its point of departure.

For example, “Earth Intruders,” driven by a relentless percussion beat that sounds like a cross between a Nigerian drum ensemble and a cardboard box, takes the same sort of primal weirdness that was at the bottom of “Army of Me” and streamlines it even further. Angelic synths squeal and whine, something akin to a computerized marimba clanks along, and Bjork’s banshee wail declaring herself the apparent leader of a battalion of angry aliens about to take over the world tops it all off. (I think the last minute and a half of the track, which is composed mostly of what sound like tugboat whistles, probably won’t be on the single edit.)

Not that Bjork’s moving toward normalcy in any kind of meaningful way, mind you. One listen to “Innocence,” in which the entire backing track seems to be coming out of a video game possessed by a legion of demons, is enough to assuage anyone worried about that. But the strangeness of Volta is focused, energetic, and creative. In fact, you might have to go back to Homogenic to get a Bjork album with quite as much of those three qualities. As she sings on “Vertebrae by Vertebrae”: “the beast is back.”

There isn’t really a failure on the album. Even the unorthodox choice in guests (Timbaland produces a couple of tracks, including “Earth Intruders,” and a sans-Johnsons Antony Hegarty stops by for a beautiful duet on “The Dull Flame of Desire”) works out well. The quieter moments, such as “Pneumonia,” with its fleet of French horn chords, still maintain enough punch to avoid dragging the album down, and the choice on a few of the tracks to integrate some of the east Asian instrumentation that Bjork was experimenting with on Drawing Restraint 9 sound organic, not forced. I guess I didn’t really need the remix of “I See Who You Are” tacked onto the end of the album, but I’m willing to overlook that.

Bottom line: Best Bjork album in a long time. And, come to think of it, one of the best albums I’ve heard recently, period.

Release date: May 8, 2007
Label: Atlantic
Rating: 9/10, with some serious potential to grow on me some more.

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