It’s starting to feel like fall is upon us here in the Pacific Northwest. Let’s get moody.
Play Dead - Björk
There’s some thematic continuation from Tuesday here. Music that I missed by musicians that I loved as a teenager. Unlike Boards of Canada - who I followed from their early releases and then lost track later - I only really ever got heavily into one Björk album.
This song, however, was not on that album. In fact, it wasn’t on any album to begin with. Released three months after her debut solo album, the cleverly-titled, uh, Debut, Play Dead was initially composed for the soundtrack to a tepid gangster movie starring Harvey Keitel and a young Viggo Mortenson. While the film didn’t exactly flop, it was certainly eclipsed by the success of this track.
Björk’s high-flying voice soars over orchestral strings and a dubby rhythm composed by erstwhile Sex Pistols associate and Public Image Limited bass player Jah Wobble and David Arnold who would go on to score every James Bond film from Tomorrow Never Dies through Quantum of Solace.
In what was surely not an instance of cosmic serendipity, the drum track is a sample of the opening drums of Footsteps in the Dark by the Isley Brothers. Eight months before Play Dead was released, another song famously copped the hook of Footsteps - the immortal Good Day by Ice Cube. Buoyed by all these elements, Play Dead became such a success that Björk’s label, One Little Indian, rushed to include it on the second printing of Debut.
While I never gave the record it’s due during my “Björk phase” in highschool, I’ve been digging it heavy lately. More than any of her other records (at least the ones I’ve been listening to) Debut brings a playful, expansive approach to the songwriting. Frequently, Björk employs samples from places as diverse as Brazilian samba pioneer Antonio Carlos Jobim, funk giants The Fatback Band, Exotica vibraphonist Arthur Lyman, oh, and Always There by Ronnie Laws.
All of this paved the way for 1998’s Homogenic, an album that I unabashedly love and holds a special, nostalgic place in my heart.
All is Full of Love - Death Cab for Cutie
Fast forward a few years from my deep infatuation with Björk. Punk, hardcore and emo had come to dominate my sonic landscape. The internet had not reached the expansive heights of today, so one of the ways I got turned on to new music was to just go out and buy random albums and see what they were like.
My friend Jeremiah and I would spend hours poring over the racks at Sam Goody, Media Play, CD Warehouse and Discontent, looking for new and strange records to blast from the speakers of his champagne-colored 1995 Honda Accord. In the early 00s, one of the ways to find bands that aligned with the particular brand of emo and hardcore that we were into, was to just pick the ones with the longest band names. At the Drive In, From Autumn to Ashes, The Sea and Cake, Death Cab for Cutie.
In my youthful exuberance, I had tamped down my love of electronic music in favor of sworn fealty to the unvarnished approach of punk and rock and roll. When I picked up The Stability EP by Death Cab and heard vocalist Ben Gibbard’s plaintive rendition of Björk’s All is Full of Love over a skittering, drum and bass-inspired beat done on a trap set by then-drummer Michael Schorr, I was floored.
Here was a band situated solidly in the milieu of emo and indie rock showing their appreciation for electro-pop and even blending it further with rave-influenced breakbeats. This may sound naive, but in some small way, I think that made me feel less alone. Like I didn’t have to give up parts of myself in order to find new ones. Like my output could always be a unique blend of my own influences, just like Björk’s sampling on her first album, just like Ben Gibbard’s work as one half of the electro-pop group the Postal Service.
That’s all for today. Thanks for listening.