The name, Bjork, just screams 'swan dress'. Despite her infamous red-carpet attire, her music is quite different from her provocative onstage persona.
The track Crystalline is a perfect representation of Bjork's new album, Biophilia. It starts peacefully, builds slowly and blows your mind with its use of electronic beats and a solo on the gameleste - a unique hybrid instrument created for Bjork.
Her vocals are beautifully eerie, but take time to get used to; although there is a certain allure to her slightly distorted enunciation, as it gives listeners a new perspective on language, it is irritating. I'd like to know what she's singing without wincing and looking up the lyrics.
Yet regardless of her incomprehensible wailing, her words can really draw you in {minus} visually, not aurally. Cosmogony can be considered to be vaguely allegorical, with allusions to God. It begins with lines such as 'Heaven. Heaven's bodies' and 'He made what became the world we know' - perhaps hinting at the creation of the world.
The lyrics are the best part of the album as you are free to interpret them, however you like. Biophilia is not an album for the average listener. The music is soothing and her lyrics are haunting at best, perhaps more suited for a Tim Burton film if the vocals were cut out.