Interesting insights into Bjork's music and process, which is pretty much all you could ask from a book in this series. This book was... fine? It wasn't bad but it slipped through my brain and left none of itself behind.

Great essay on an amazing artist. Not just one for fans, this 33 1/3 title really makes the processes behind the album easy to understand for those not in the industry.
I'd highly recommend this for secondary/high school students of music.

There are any number of ways to write a 33 1/3, but this excellent entry is pretty much a type specimen: find a significant artist, pick a key album, then go deep into its specifics. The more detailed, the better, so long as it’s all enlightening rather than merely trainspottery; Mackay looks at everything from rejected tracklistings and mixes, to where the mics were placed on the cellos, but always in service of what such specifics mean for the artistic goals and emotional impact of the finished piece. Context is good, too: it’s strange now to be reminded that back when <i>Homogenic</i> came out, most of the media treated Björk as a comedy pixie, at least until the awful incident which saw her consider quitting music but instead ended up being the piece of grit from which this album’s pearl came*. Mackay is excellent on the tensions of this; one winces at some of the exoticism applied to Björk in the UK music press (one reviewer’s sealclubbing/nightclubbing gag probably wouldn’t pass muster today), but at other times it was a trope with which the singer would happily play along. Then too, even in Iceland she’d been regarded as an exotic outsider, her looks seeing her nicknamed ‘China girl’ as a kid, and there’s a sense that it was being outside her homeland which allowed her, circa <i>Homogenic</i>, to make her peace with her roots and her early classical education, and assimilate them into her work. And this sense of synthesis carries over into the recurring theme here: that from <i>Homogenic</i> onwards, if not before, Björk has been determined to break down false dichotomies between nature and technology. As she pointed out, all that time ago, before anyone had written asinine, slappable <i>Guardian</i> columns about how much realer life was without gadgets: all that distinguishes technology from nature is time. You see a log cabin now, you think of it as part of a natural scene, but once that was new tech. Synths are as natural as violins are as natural as birds’ nests. And it’s the responsibility of all of us, but especially artists, to ensure that the new spaces technology opens up have heart and humanity brought into them, because corporations aren’t going to ensure that themselves.

There’s plenty more, too – an impressive amount packed into such a slim volume. Not always strictly about <i>Homogenic</i>, either. Talking about Björk’s love of collaboration, Mackay gets into the way it wouldn’t always sit right with the auteur narrative beloved of more rockist writers, the way they expected a genius to be a (presumably male) lone songwriter and tended to attribute Björk’s beats to those working with her, while she herself was assumed to be some kind of idiot savant. And in the course of this we also learn that lines in ‘Big Time Sensuality’ which you’d assume were to a lover in fact concerned collaboration and were directed at Nellee Hooper; they were about making sweet music together, but literally. My other favourite titbit regarding lyrics: 'Army of Me’ very nearly included the line 'you're worse than Morrissey’. If only she’d release that version now… There’s a whole strand regarding Björk’s ‘paneroticism’; the <i>Story of O</i> bits were a particular surprise given I was in part reading this as light relief from a Kathy Acker biography. And I’ve never heard of anyone with such a charmingly innocent take on <i>The Story of the Eye</i>! This of course ties in with Chris Cunningham’s stupendously late video for the album’s final track, ‘All is Full of Love’ ("‘It was perfect,’ said Cunningham. ‘I got to play around with the two things I was into as a teenager: robots and porn.’”), and takes us back to the permeable line between natural and mechanical, as well as providing a nice capstone to an account of the album’s visual incarnations (including those rejected because, at the time, they would have been unrealistically expensive; nowadays you could probably get half of them done by a kid with a laptop).

Netgalley copies are, after all, advance proofs, but this one had a particularly odd glitch - all instances of the letter groupings 'fi' and 'fl' had been deleted. But certain words crop up often enough that within a chapter or two you're reading 'dened' and 'rst' quite naturally – yet still noticing their frequency in a way you might not in a clean text.
(Conversely, every so often the letters ‘dP’ appear for no apparent reason, and without offering similar enlightenment)

*Specifically, the racist fan who killed himself and sent her an acid bomb over her relationship with Goldie - again, something I’d entirely forgotten until I saw it mentioned here and thought oh yes, of course, that wanker! Weird how even a big story one lived through can fade so thoroughly.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Bjork's Homogenic, and while the album was not her most commercially-successful or ambitious release, it was her first truly thematically and musically-cohesive album and many fans (this book review author included, though Vespertine makes a strong challenge for the spot every now and again) believe it to be her best full-length. Clearly this is an important work deserving its own entry in Bloomsbury Press' long-running 33 1/3 series, which are generally light and breezy critical explorations of seminal albums. There is no set template for 33 1/3 books, leading to a good amount of diversity, but Emily Mackay, a writer for the likes of NME, The Guardian, and The Quietus, adopts the popular "let's briefly analyze this album from every possible relevant angle" framework and executes it quite well. Her end result is a highly readable look at a classic album that should offer insights and new material for even the most devoted Bjork enthusiasts.

Homoegenic is divided into nine chapters that each study the album from a different perspective. Mackay starts by examining how Bjork's turbulent experiences in the mid-90s, including receiving a letter bomb from a mentally-unstable fan and attacking a reporter at an airport, influenced Homogenic. The middle is devoted to the album itself, looking at lyrical and musical themes and how everything was constructed. The book ends with a study of Bjork's boundary-pushing music videos and experiments with virtual reality and how Bjork has always been at the forefront of technical innovations (her official website launched in 1994 on the same month as the U.S. government's) and places Homogenic in the context of Bjork's discography.

Mackay draws heavily from Bjork's interviews, and the book benefits considerably from Bjork being such a prolific interview subject and so open and honest with music journalists. In addition to the usual magazine interviews, Mackay also mines chat logs and other communications and all of the quotes she shares are relevant and thoughtful. A good bit of them were also new to me, which is a considerable achievement given I have devoured a good bit of the content on the outstanding bjork.fr fansite (as Mackay did over the course of writing her book). That is not to say that this is just a rehashing of old interviews, as the author provides her own analysis when breaking down the album's lyrical and musical content and she also was able to interview major players who worked on the album including composer Eumir Deodato. Some 33 1/3 books fall flat with die-hard fans of the album because a lot of the content is old hat to them, but Homogenic does not suffer from this as there is plenty of original material.

The best 33 1/3 books cause listeners to increase their appreciation for their subjects and Mackay succeeds in that area as well. She identifies several subtle musical flourishes that such as how a short synth riff emulates whale noises during Bachelorette and how the electronic whines that open "Hunter" are actually distorted samples of an accordion that I wasn't aware of even after listening to the album tons of times. Homogenic made me want to jump back into the album and look for all the themes and elements Mackay touched upon in her book as well as look for other things I might have missed. Fans of Bjork will really enjoy this and this is one of the stronger entries in the series.

8.5 / 10

This was an unexpected gem. I downloaded the only two from this series that feature musicians and albums I'm familiar with (the other was Arcade Fire's The Suburbs). I wasn't super excited to read about Homogenic, since I'm only a casual Bjork fan, and left this title until last. Mistake! While I was considerably let down by The Suburbs, Homogenic immediately drew me in and kept me hooked until the very last word!

The author pulled from so many interesting interviews with Bjork herself and the people around her during the album's production, and gave a really interesting insight into the technology and process behind the album's distinctive sounds. I loved finding out about her creative process, and the different influences that went into each song and music video.

A really great music review or critique will compel you to go back a re-listen to the songs, and give you context for appreciating and listening in a new way. This is what happened for me with Homogenic. I periodically had to stop reading and put on the CD, to re-listen to a certain song or listen for a specific lyric, compelled by what I'd just read.

While this book can never come out and admit that this album was where Bjork got too pretentious and started losing all pop prestige in favour of arty-farty stuff and far too many re-releases, live sets, box sets, and digital virtual gumf, it is a musicologist's masterclass of studying a classy album in an equally classy way. The writing is good enough to sway the passing curious as well as the fan, and it just begs you to play the music it so informatively discusses. Everything from the inspirations for the composition to the video singles' history and how it's reflected on by Bjork's oeuvre to this day is covered, in a book that must surely succeed in giving even the most encyclopaedically-minded fan something new. So much of this series just does NOT have any link with my taste in music, but when it does it's brilliant.

It is a given that all of the authors of books in Bloomsbury’s Thirty-three and a Third series are fans of the artists and albums that they’ve chosen to write about. But sometimes love is not all you need. A fan, by definition, is uncritical but these particular fans cannot afford to be.

They need to re-route to their head something which was successfully addressed to their heart, so as to be able to articulate precisely what it is that excites their affection and enthusiasm, enabling the fellow fan-reader to be better informed about and more assured in their own allegiance. Emily Mackay’s ‘Björk’s Homogenic’ succeeds admirably in this regard, making it one of the best products in this notoriously patchy brand.

Although unable to speak with Alexander McQueen (who styled the album cover and who died in 2010); Mark Bell (a Homogenic co-producer, who died in 2014); Howie B (another co-producer); Mark Stent and Marcus De Vries (who respectively mixed and recorded the album); the various video directors; or Björk herself, Mackay, in addition to trawling the secondary literature, has diligently and revealingly conversed with Guy Sigsworth (the album’s third co-producer); Markus Dravs (who principally programmed the album’s beats); Eumir Deodato (who was responsible for the string arrangements); Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson (aka Sjón, Björk intimate and lyrical collaborator); Paul White and Alistair Beattie (album designers); Einar Örn Benediktsson (fellow former Sugarcubes band member and Björk website designer); and even Professor Carolyne Larrington (expert in Norse mythology).

The result is a highly readable and illuminating guide to all aspects of the Icelandic shapeshifter’s stunningly ambitious third album, which confirmed her as a mature talent with a unique artistic voice.