By Joshua Gross

Daily Arts Writer

Lars Von Trier's new award-winning movie "Dancer in the Dark," for which Selmasongs is the soundtrack, is a musical set within the labyrinthine decay of neglected mechanical factories, stacks of unused robotics in dusty corners, mysterious bolts and screws littering the floor. Unsurprisingly, the recording is metallic. It sounds fantastic but tastes like rust. While these recordings celebrate Bjork's melodramatic voice, they lack the fullness of "It's Oh So Quiet," her previous attempt at the excess of the big-band musical genre with its surplus of drunken horns and bamboozled crashes.

The soft-hearted splendor of the terse three-minute overture "Cvalda" is sliced into by the sound of machinery, as if the saws and jackhammers are splitting the very song in which they are contained. But these abrasive sounds are cut into as well, this time by Bjork's dove-like, soaring cry. These distinct, contradictory sounds meld together to create a clatter not unlike a "Sound of Music" recording being ripped apart as it plays, Julie Andrew's voice strangely untouched, airborne.

In "I've Seen It All," Bjork and Radiohead's Thom Yorke sing a restrained duet; their orchestral inflated sedateness sounds like Rogers and Hammerstein singing through a burlap sack, which is a compliment. "109 Steps" is the most infantile songwriting imaginable, Bjork counting every few steps from one to one hundred and nine, but it is as simple and beautiful as a prayer when transformed by her voice, strutting as proud as a kaleidoscopic peacock and then hiding like a shy baby mouse.

These songs, the skeleton of the film, occur too sporadically to form a cohesive story on their own. The album suffers from this diffusion, and as a result it does not stand well as a recording alone. The sound is Technicolor, but unfortunately, sound is invisible.

Grade: C+