The Singles Jukebox

It’s a lion!

[Video][Website]
[6.67]

Micha Cavaseno: Look, we’ve been over this. This is not Bjork trying to make songs about the protozoa who are slowly causing the doom of the great barrier reef. This is not Bjork talking about the power of the tectonic plates and how that is parallel to the tooth decay she’s fending off within her daughter’s mouth. This is Bjork’s voice hardwired into her heart, complete with slipshod duets with herself, vocoder-eroded wails. The sound of one’s fear providing disassociation and out of body experience. Who cares if the earth is *Bjork voice* crackliiiiing, when your life is falling apart? Fuck the planet, girl, do you. Live. Survive! This is not some forced soundtrack of a National Geographic program, this is a war to breath, and Bjork has never been one to go down meekly and humbly. Even should she sink into the magma, she’s going to do it on the most triumphant and throaty note, so all who witness may comprehend that she did this to live and to love.
[10]

Will Adams: Following the outpouring of “Stonemilker” and preceding the haunted and ghostly “History of Touches,” “Lionsong” struggles to assert itself on Vulnicura. While its reliably gorgeous (those strings!), even on its own it feels complacent, meandering through keys and loosely defined structures.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Less of a slog in isolation than on the album, “Lionsong” rakes over the ashes of a relationship, Bjork and the string section in scary syncopation. It’s more powerful and interesting than compelling though. Like she says, once it was simple, one feeling at a time.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but this reminds me of nothing so much as The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir produced by Matmos. Big, weird-to-American-ears harmonies with glitchy beats. The lyrics are painful and lovely but there’s something oddly lacking for me. So many artists go from artsy to poppy; Björk has gone the opposite direction, and I’m not sure her work is the better for it.
[4]

Rebecca A. Gowns: I’ve always admired Björk’s voice: it’s strong, it belts, but it’s feathered at the edges, soft, and mysterious no matter how much she reveals; like a cloud-covered planet swooping through the skies at thousands of miles per hour, looking still and aloof from afar, but teeming with life up close. The verses here are exposed and sensual, running down small tributaries, while the choruses, for all their anticipation, sound like dirges. She holds the tension between these two — as well as the tension between her voice and her harmonized voices, between the strings and the spidery beats — as powerful and enigmatic as ever.
[9]

Luisa Lopez: I love listening to her voice, even when I can’t stand the sound. There’s a painful frequency in her music, an unruly sickness that courses through the best songs and lights a kind of nausea in the stomach. She doesn’t make it easy: love or boredom or arousal, each feeling gets stripped down to its root. When I want the ugly parts of joy, the points on a body where loneliness turns into hysteria, I come to her. There are lots of reasons to stay; here it’s one / feeling / at a / time, which becomes, for a moment, something that could be called “lovely”: listenable, bearable, light. It only stays for a moment. 
[6]