GLACIER HEAD.(singer - Bjork)(Critical Essay)

The thirty-seven-year-old singer and songwriter Bjork titled her fourth solo CD, released in 2001, "Vespertine"--a word used to describe things that flower or flourish in the evening--and, listening to the album, you can almost smell the associations: the heady but ethereal perfume of night blossoms; the dripping wax of candles lit for vespers; the drugs burning as the telephone rings, the answering machine set to mute. Bjork conjures up colder references, too: in particular, the image of herself trekking across "the glacier head" of her native Iceland, "looking . . . for moments of shine," as she sings in "Aurora," one of the album's strongest tracks. Bjork makes us feel the clammy toes in damp fur boots, see the fur-hatted girl on a glistening sphere of snow, using her voice to make the ice crack.

It is that voice--her lungs are like an accordion filled with broken glass--that we can appreciate in all its emotional eclecticism on the newly released six-CD set "Family Tree." The set includes a disk of Bjork's "Greatest Hits," as she sees them--a selection that incorporates several of her arresting B-sides. (Another "Greatest Hits" was released a few months ago, chosen by fans online. Predictably, they went mostly for songs that were dance hits.) Two other CDs, "Strings" and "Beats," examine the ways in which the classical music and avant-garde electronica Bjork studied early in her career inform her work and make her what she is--a glamorous and highly trained computer geek. (The boxed set also makes clear her interest in world music as a metaphor for community. Her first touring band featured international musicians, ranging from an Iranian keyboard player and an Indian tabla player to a Barbadian bassist--not the best strategy if you want to cross over, but there you have it.) As an anthology of Bjork's sound, and as a chronicle of where she's been as a solo artist for the ten years since she left her enormously successful band, the Sugarcubes, "Family Tree" is useful, if somewhat skeletal; it lacks the slowly evolving density of her four solo albums, on which her story--as a star with a hit album at age eleven and international fame at twenty-eight, and as an immigrant in search of a home, love, and a place in music--unfolds with a kind of itchy grace.

Recorded in London, Bjork's first solo album, "Debut" (1993), was produced by Nellee Hooper, who studied in the school of beautiful and urbane sound popularized by the band Massive Attack on its 1991 album "Blue

Lines." Soulful and just this side of depressed, Massive Attack combined rap and house music with certain technological innovations that began with spinning: letting the record drag, playing the scratches as a sonic element, and so on. Bjork married her white soul--the pathos of the provincial--to Massive Attack's blacker, more sophisticated riffs: a form of musical miscegenation. What made "Debut" all the more refreshing was her uncommercial approach. There was no pre-sell. There were no hair extensions. And Bjork never, as so many singer-songwriters do, wrote songs about regret. She was an ascetic interested in sexual abandon, and she whooped and swooped her way through her first three albums, until she reached the culmination of the quieter "Vespertine." As a maturing artist, it seemed, she had less to prove; she had told her story, and now it was time to understand it.

Singing is mostly breathing, and the best singers can make that breath resonate as pure feeling. There were great physical singers before Bjork--Janis Joplin, for instance, and Patti ...