In 2001, my parents and I watched an Icelandic singer named Björk take the stage at the Oscars in a dead swan dress, where she performed "I've Seen It All" from her film Dancer in the Dark. The elder Fishbeins were not impressed by this music, which I recall them describing as "the mating sounds aliens must make." (Years later, these same lovely but misguided people called to tell me they saw someone named Thom Yorke on SNL who was "terrible" and "can't sing at all.") I myself largely forgot about Björk until college, where I discovered that a certain combination of Homogenic and Sigur Ros would best lull me to sleep during those nights I was most worried about a paper, a test, or a boy.
Nearly a decade later, I got to sit five rows away from Björk at Carnegie Hall at noon on a Saturday, at the second of her seven "intimate" NYC shows this year. And it was a thing to behold: Björk, flanked by a 15-person string orchestra, took the stage in a glistening headdress made of spikes that obscured her face, opening with ethereal renditions of "Stonemilker" and "Lionsong" off her new album, Vulnicura. For the next forty minutes, she ran through the album's first six tracks. Behind her, a video screen played looped geometric videos mesmerizing enough to trigger even the most buried acid flashback, with lyrics recalling heartbreak, loneliness and images of death scrolling below.
For the second half of the performance, Björk ditched the headdress in favor of flowing white fabric and offered up a few classic crowd-pleasers, belting out tracks like "The Pleasure Is All Mine" and "Undo." For a portion of the set the crowd was treated to a full-screen close-up of slugs mating, an activity that appears to have spawned a wealth of videos on YouTube.
Björk closed with the last two tracks off Vulnicura, surrounded by the enlarged shadows of the string players onstage. The album was written in the aftermath of a messy breakup, and the raw pain rippled through the audience with each wail Björk emitted. It takes a certain artist to reduce an audience to tears at an hour most New Yorkers reserve for brunch, but it turns out emotional catharsis, stringed instruments, and writhing slugs can soothe the angriest of hangovers.
