Review: Björk "Surrounded"

Review: Björk "Surrounded"

Bjork "Surrounded": Aidin Vaziri | It costs too much, the quality of the music is wildly inconsistent and we're still not certain why anyone needs to own an album in both DVD and traditional CD formats. Otherwise, this box set containing deluxe edition reissues of Björk's entire solo catalog gets it right -- the sound quality is incredible, the packaging attractive and bundling each double-sided disc with its accompanying music videos is a smart move, although including the B-sides for each album would have made it even better. While it's hard to guess who "Surrounded" was made for -- Björk's obsessive fans surely already have all the material here and it sounded fine the first time around, while newcomers will simply be overwhelmed by the rash of fax machine beats and Inuit throat singers -- it provides a great opportunity to re-evaluate the groundbreaking work of the cosmic Icelandic songstress. It culminates with her most recent albums, 2004's "Medulla," which was built entirely around vocal samples, no instruments, and last year's darkly restrained score for "Drawing Restraint 9," almost entirely instrumental -- releases that are so ahead of their time they are still largely unlistenable. Meanwhile, her first post-Sugarcubes releases, 1993's club-hopping "Debut" and 1995's string-laden "Post," already sound dated, especially the thumping single "Army of Me." So it's her mid-period stuff that does wonders -- 1997's "Homogenic" bravely fuses techno and classical with desperately lovelorn lyrics in tunes like "Joga" and "Bachlorette" that help it retain its urgency. Meanwhile, 2001's emotionally uninhibited "Vespertine" towers above everything else with its blueprint-shredding arrangements and old-fashioned poignancy, particularly during the last few seconds of "Pagan Poetry," where Björk chants "I love him, I love him, I love him." She makes the point that few people can deliver such a common sentiment in such an uncommonly evocative way.