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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Atlantic / Wea
Salesrank: 20766
Released: May 8, 2007 |
| Our Price: $2.00 |
| Used Price: $1.60 |
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| Media: Audio CD |
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Volta Track Listing:
1. Earth Intruders
2. Wanderlust
3. The Dull Flame Of Desire
4. Innocence
5. I See Who You Are
6. Vertebrae By Vertebrae
7. Pneumonia
8. Hope
9. Declare Independence
10. My Juvenile
Editorial Review:
Bjork returns to her iconic, innovative and rhythmic roots with Volta. Featuring her own infamous beats and collaborations with Timbaland, Antony Hegarty, Brian Chippendale and an all-female Icelandic brass section, the end result is an explosion of beats and an amalgamtion of sound and visuals that give Volta a life of its own, like the world hasn't seen from Bjork in years.
Description of Volta:
Björk's main asset as a musician is her fearlessness. Since the end of The Sugarcubes and the pop-dance of Debut, she has released progressively more experimental records. But after well over a decade of going further and further out, Volta steps back. Make no mistake; this is Björk, and so it's still fabulously weird. Like 2004's mesmerizing Medúlla and the 2005 soundtrack for Drawing Restraint 9, the songs are blissfully peculiar, with narratives about love, offspring, aliens...you name it. Yet melodically and philosophically, Volta recycles more than it innovates; the driving pulse of "Declare Independence," for instance, reminds us of Homogenic's "Pluto," and the lead single "Earth Intruders" sounds like Post's "Army of Me" on steroids. And just as Medúlla oriented itself around a certain instrument--the human voice--this one concentrates on horns.
Still, the transition between her early work and the avant-garde bender she's been on since Vespertine is pretty harrowing, and it's satisfying to hear Björk revisit her more accessible self. Uber-producer Timbaland pitches in here and there, most successfully on "Innocence," which uses a fat, disjointed pulse to drive the euphoric vocals forward. Elsewhere, the hyperactive sitar sample on "I See Who You Are" provides texture for the song's theme of enjoying each other while there's still "flesh on our bones." And "Pneumonia" makes fantastic use of the horn section with a soft arrangement that compliments the song's lyrical melody.
So while it's a bit of a stall, Volta is a lovely pause. It reminds us how much we appreciate the laboratory of Björk’s imagination, but also how much we missed her back when she was just goofing around. –Matthew Cooke
Volta Reviews:
Only a few duds... 
2009-10-02 - The thing with this cd is that there are a few stupid songs mixed in with a bunch of real nice tracks. It's not as bad as some reviewed it but there are a few duds here instead of a solid, all the way through, album. Buy it used. It is worth it for the Bjork fan.
Listenable. 
2009-06-22 - I've never been into Bjork whatsoever, I always thought of her as Psychotic & "outthere" like a baglady that talks to herself (That's added to my curiosity about her over the years although I've never liked her music), but after hearing her song "Earth Intruders" on MusicChoice back in 2007 I couldn't help but snatch this CD up. This is my very first Bjork CD, I'm lost when it comes to career. I know nothing about it, I have many friends that's played her music over the years and it just never appealed to me, But. Something was different this time around. I knew her voice when the song came on and the song was something i'd actually listen to. I couldn't believe it, From everything else i've heard by Bjork this album is a bit more Pop/Dance-ish than anything else I can recall hearing. I have a weakness for HOT dance tracks, And this is neat. Overall this is a CD that's in a class of it's own, it really took me by surprise. I hear alot of Hip-Hop influences (Not the Noisy annoying type) it's just small samples of the genre within a few songs. Bjork's "VOLTA" is one of my latest experiments I guess you could say. It says alot about Bjork when someone who's never cared for your music rates your latest album 4 stars. I know her true fans must hate this CD if I like it. I'll be interested in hearing the follow-up to this.
Bjork goes Glitch?
2009-04-28 - Never thought I'd see the day. This is a surprisingly aggressive set, reminiscent more of NIN than of her usual style.
Pomme
A More Grounded Bjork
2009-03-11 - While I'm not as fond of this album as I am of Bjork's other albums, I have to give her credit where credit is due. The music on this album, while overall not as energetic and invigorating as that of her other albums, is still exciting. It just has a more earth-mother / mature kind of sound. In some ways, the music on this album first comes off as a little boring, but after more listenings, it's really beautiful in that unique, Bjork kind of way...even if it's not the younger Bjork that we were accustomed to.
A poor album from a great artist. 
2008-11-04 - I'll admit, I have never been too big of a fan of Bjork. I mean, I like a lot of her work, but not enough to consider myself a fan or an avid listener. I always feel like her albums are good, or sometimes even great, so I always buy just one more in the hopes that it will trump the last one I listened to. I now own four Bjork albums, and I think I was easily the most disappointed with Volta. In fact, I'd say this is the biggest disappointment of the year so far. And it's not like I dislike Bjork, once again. Homogenic and Vespertine are both great albums that I really like a lot, and in comparison to those, Bjork has taken a creative nosedive into oblivion.
I feel like XRTs "Regaler Guy" here, because my vocabulary is somewhat limited and my tone is very blatant. But I won't lie about this one. Volta sucks because it sucks. There isn't any one particular reason for the mediocrity of this album besides sheer lack of creative drive or enjoyable songs. Before Volta came out, I heard Bjork perform on Saturday Night Live and I was really impressed. One thing I will give Bjork at this point is that her vocals have not gotten any worse since the early nineties when she first started out. Her range is really fantastic and she gets out some downright beautiful notes on stage. So with that I felt optimistic about Volta, and yet it ends up being pretty mediocre. I think it's one of those albums that I really, really wish could have worked out because it just works so well on paper. It is a little bit themed, in that it seems to capture, or at least try to capture that atmosphere of tropical islands. To some extent, she make this apparent. The lead single Earth Intruders actually sounds very fresh with it's jungle beat and eclectic instruments. But then when the song finally ends, it proves itself unfit for playlist inclusion and leans on the sounds of large steamboats for about a minute and a half. Either way, it's a good start and a nice opening song.
And then the next song, Wanderlust actually sounds alright too. Bjork can get away with rather brutal sounding techno by laying her voluptuous voice over it, and the result is actually pretty good. But after that, things severely melt down. First, she does an eight minute long duet with some guy named Antony Hegarty, who is apparently fairly well known and respected, but I really dislike his lispy voice. The words are, as usual, pretty cheesy. I can't stress enough how much I wish Bjork would sing in her native language like her fellow Icelandic compatriots Sigur Ros. And then the unbalanced vocalists sing about...some dull flame of some sort for seven minutes and it is really annoying. It's just bad. The rest of the album is equally disappointing. I've always depended on Bjorks musical and vocal talent to outdo the lack of melodicism in her words, and unfortunately she just can't pull off the musical part here. The songs Innocence and Declare Independence are both very obnoxious and uninteresting. On Hope, she tries interspersing some more exotic instruments to very mixed success. This was the idea she should have tried to bring to the forefront and stress more often, and maybe this would have worked back in her heyday when she was more poppy and less dark.
It has it's moments. I really enjoy Pneumonia, and to some extent My Juvenile even if Antony makes a similarly mediocre comeback because the words are very lovely. But for the most part, this album is just very mediocre. I won't go into individual detail on every song, but honestly, there is very little good material here. Bjork fans seem to like it though, so who knows. If you are a casual fan, like me I guess, you are better off going for some of the more revered Bjork albums instead, namely Homogenic and Vespertine.
