Björk

Last spring, charmingly daft Icelandic singer Björk won the best actress medal at the Cannes Film Festival for playing a modern Joan of Arc slowly going blind as she recedes into a fantasy life of musicals playing in her head. Selmasongs, named for her character in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (see review on page 37), has the scope, epic arrangements, schmaltz, and power of real musical theater. That it’s jammed into a 32-minute EP is an advantage for Björk, whose longer records suffer from the scattered attention of an unchecked auteur. Still, even Selmasongs is not completely without filler. Its symphonic overture, from which the amazing closing anthem, “New World,” is drawn, is unnecessary without Björk’s voice.

That voice remains pop’s most frustrating high-wire act. For a few seconds during the giddily mechanical animal “Cvalda,” she sounds like Julie Andrews (in the film, Selma plays the Andrews role in an amateur production of The Sound of Music). She returns to Björk with an otherworldly wail that threatens to enact an amateur production of Scanners before she blends easily with Radiohead’s mercurial Thom Yorke on the stunning duet “I’ve Seen It All.”

Maybe no one but Björk could sell in song the idea of a woman living so deep in fugue. But Björk’s career thus far is nothing less than that: a songwriter who has conjured a fairy world that needs no tougher stuff than the occasional joyous, glass-breaking caterwaul, but a performer whose persona hints at the delusionary schism her music holds at bay. If Selmasongs has a serious flaw, it’s only that Björk’s voice and tension are too modern and un-self-conscious to really suggest the American musicals that obsess her character. In fact, the brief EP is the most forceful work she’s constructed, the product of someone looking forward, not back.