The Singles Jukebox

Björk found this dressphere at the La Brea tar pits.

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[7.00]

Will Adams: A study in musical pools. The verses read like fragments, like notes scribbled before they escape the mind. They sink into the arrangement’s depths until they’re no longer visible in the murk. Rising up, however, is the plea of “I/You care for you/me,” a devastating summary of the reciprocal nature of care. With “The Gate,” it’s easy to forget that it’s pulling you in with the well-worn slow build formula because the resulting churn of emotion is too captivating to ignore.
[8]

Eleanor Graham: For all it reveled in minute-long string jags, towering and disintegrating tangents from recognisable melody, and general, you know, Björkness, Vulnicura was a bracingly direct break-up album. Shrugged “Lionsong”: “Maybe he will come out of this loving me – maybe he won’t.” Cried “Stonemilker”: “Show me emotional respect!” This song is not a departure, hanging all its hopes for emotional resonance on four agonised words – “I care for you!” – repeated against synths that exhale rattlesnakes and ghosts and inhale Disney panpipes and computerised bubbles. Ultimately, “The Gate” suffers the same fate as “Black Lake” in that there is too much emptiness in its sprawling sonic wasteland. The latter at least was a thing to be felt; this is just a thing to be admired. Its desolation/infatuation/desperation is apparent but lacks urgency. As far as stirring church-y atmospherics go, Susanne Sundfør accomplished far more in under three minutes.
[4]

Leah Isobel: Vulnicura was one of the most heart-shattering pieces of music I’ve ever listened to, direct in form but utterly despairing in content. It was my gateway to Björk, and introduced me to the dizzying emotional heights she can scale within a pop structure, but its sense of sheer hopelessness keeps me from returning to it much. “The Gate” goes in the opposite direction. Arca’s production lights up like one of those freaky deep-sea fish, but the electronic edges are blunted, leaving only the eerie neon luminescence. Björk, meanwhile, lets her voice unspool a patient melody that seems to float in the ether. I like the slow development on the theme, and her candid admission that she wasn’t always “so needy,” but I’m more excited by the implicit promise that better things are to come – both for Björk-as-song-narrator, and on her upcoming album.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The spaces between the verses, filled with glacial movement and rigorous, almost minimal electronic declarations, make the proposal of caring not one of warmth or of love but of difficult obligation. She sings “care” somewhere between a phrase book and a declaration of unpleasant moral necessity. The song is easier about caring than how she sings about it, but it is still cold, and a little lonely. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: Years experimenting with the expositional and dramatic use of space and spare synth string effects culminate in “The Gate.” I haven’t heard so many nuances wrung out of the word “care.” But by the four-minute mark Bjork has reached the limits of nuance, drama, and exposition.
[5]

Tim de Reuse: Bjork’s vocal performance takes center stage, as it often does, but an equal star here is producer Arca’s production work. It’s a marvelously unfriendly backdrop, as icy and alien as any take from his solo work: arrhythmic, woody kick drums, dramatic faux-orchestral trills, moaning detuned melodies, uncomfortably high clicks fed through oceans of reverb. This instrumental is fragmented and difficult to keep track of, with only a vague overarching trend of growth, and it’s just as temporally disorienting the whole way through as Bjork’s freeform lamentations. By totally refusing the listener basic metrical or structural points of reference, its individual sections feel slippery and formless in memory, and it makes a bright blur of an overall impression even as it’s difficult to recall exactly how the beginning differs from the end. That kind of effect doesn’t always pan out in a song’s favor, of course, but every piece of this song’s construction seems to have been tweaked to accentuate this effect; a jumbled, half-ordered cloud of dramatic, interrelated events floating in a bubble of space. Listening through it is like trying to remember a fantastic, weird dream.
[9]