No seriously, the new Bjork album is realllly good - pass it on

I was thinking about leaving the site alone today, knowing that tomorrow will almost inevitably yield some blather (maybe even pictures!) regarding the Scroobius Pip show I'm going to tonight.

BUT

then I read this interview with Bjork. One aspect of her new album (Volta) which I can mention without this degenerating into a wank about how much pleasure her music gives me...is how it reflects something I've never seen in any of her previous work.

Politics.

Now you could muddy the waters by getting into the sexual "politics" of a lot of her work, particularly if you are one of those people who see no distinguishing difference between belief's, opinions and politics. So to clarify, I am talking about Politics with a capital P. One song addresses a suicide bomber while another is a rallying cry against colonialism and there are subtler undercurrents in a couple of other songs as well. It isn't so present as to make it a Political Album but it's rather noticeable when all that's come before has been more to do with nature, love, raw emotions and a host of other things from which you'd have to get rather metaphorical to draw any connecting lines to the news of the day.

It's nice to have been a fan of someone for ten years and still feel that new facets and sides are being revealed to you, that there are are still more to come. Coming back to the article that sparked this post, the specific portion which made me appreciate her even more is thus:

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Interviewer:There’s a lot of personal sentiment on Volta—I’m thinking of “Dull Flame of Desire” or “Wanderlust”—but there’s also a lot of politically oriented stuff, like “Declare Independence” (personal/political) and “Earth Intruders,” where you try to assert a kind of pre-civilized state. I’m curious what—besides the tsunami in Southeast Asia, which you mentioned in another interview—helped you return to this sentiment, which reminds me more of something like “Human Behavior” than anything else.

Bjork:Perhaps I am one of incredibly many that became a little pissed off with the Iraq war. And, especially since I am only spending half of my time in this country, it was pretty mind-blowing when Bush got reelected. On another note, I think that it is important to feel positive about globalism—it isn’t necessarily only an evil thing. I remember reading as a child, in music school, a quote from Stockhausen that in the next century (now) we will have killed all the animals and become only one nation, but it is going to be amazing, everybody communicating telepathically and floating into space between the stars. I don’t agree with him completely but I feel it is important to move on and stop clinging to old stuff. By moving forward and letting go, so much other stuff is going to come back to us like unite as one tribe and hopefully we’ll manage to get rid of organized religion.

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It's an easy guess which specific sentence amused me the most.