Lis­ten: Björk — Earth Intrud­ers [via Idolator]

It’s been twelve years since I first heard her and I still can’t get over her voice. [Longer than that maybe? Did I catch a Sug­ar­cubes video at a friend’s house as a kid? Was it dur­ing a hos­pi­tal vis­it as a teenag­er? That might’ve been it: I was lying in a bed, more or less total­ly still, eyes wide open, enraptured…with an IV jammed deep into my arm.] There’s some­thing so mag­i­cal about her vocal range and her will­ing­ness to try dif­fer­ent things, or maybe more dar­ing, the same thing she did years ago, the fer­al cat or del­i­cate wood­nymph come out to play.

With “Earth Intrud­ers” I feel like she’s doing laps on a fig­ure eight track, criss-cross­ing ter­ri­to­ry she cov­ered some time ago. Char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, old­er ele­ments sur­face, hel­ter skel­ter: snip­pets of “Human Behav­ior” emerge for a moment before sink­ing into the spas­tic col­lage and the mil­i­tan­cy she exhib­it­ed on Post is there too! Then again, these, plus the con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion of celebri­ty guest spots, could be the hall­marks of her midlife cri­sis record.

Don’t take my word for it. Trust Mike Pow­ell at The Agen­da. It’s not a con­dem­na­tion of Vol­ta, by the way, just a healthy dose of skep­ti­cism. After Ves­per­tine and Medul­la, Vol­ta seems a lit­tle hard to believe, much less take seriously.