Björk's New Album 'An Inquiry Into Melodrama'

Hey everyone! I came across this album review over break, where critic Ann Powers discusses Björk's new album, Vulnicura, as melodramatic. I thought you might be interested!

An excerpt from the review:

"Melodrama is a feminine form, the designated space where domestic and erotic stories can turn grandly operatic. We associate it with bodice-ripper novels and Technicolor movies in which beauties wear their anguish openly, without shame; overwrought stories, maybe, but ones that have always filled in the gaps between relentlessly macho tales of crime, politics and war. In recent years, women artists and some empathetic men have reclaimed melodrama in ways that make it both more introspective and more clearly critical of the gender divisions that required its existence in the first place. The film collaborations of Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton's extraordinary performance in I Am Love; Lydia Davis's novel The End of the Story and Jenny Offill's more recent Dept. of Speculation: these are the works that form a frame around Vulnicura, reminding us that this is not just a raw reflection of Bjork's breakup with her fellow fabulist Matthew Barney, but an intellectually ambitious intervention into melodrama itself.

In Bjork's hands, melodrama becomes an avenue of self-reflection."

Click here to check out the NPR review: Bjork's 'Vulnicura': An Inquiry Into Melodrama