Bjork belts fantasia of color and sound

Arms stretched out from her sides like an incandescent 't,' fidgety as a toddler in church, Bjork collapsed into a fighter's stance, shadow boxing with the beat -- and what a worthy opponent it was.

It ducked and dived, swerved and curved, seduced and intimidated, skittering all over the place haphazardly, like a sack of marbles let loose on a sheet of ice.

How predictably unpredictable.

Bjork's songs are like stereograms -- you know, that brightly colored, jumbled-looking computer-generated art that you have to stare at, relaxing your eyes, until a central image emerges from the background.

Bjork's catalog works on the same level: there's plenty of bustling going on in the foreground -- chattering electronics, wild-eyed vocal exorcisms, rhythms that crash into one another like sumo wrestlers slapping bellies -- and it's up to the listener to take it all in and decipher the shapes and sounds into something meaningful.

"Do you see a pattern?" Bjork asked in song at one point. "Relentlessly restless. Restless relentlessly."

True to her words, Bjork's albums are moving targets, rootless as tumbleweeds, inherently malleable, hammered into shape by a voice that can be light as a kitten's footsteps and heavy as a murderer's conscience, all in the same breath.

At The Pearl on Saturday, Bjork treated her repertoire like wet clay to be flung about with a kindergartner's impulsiveness.

Flanked by a ten-piece, all-female horn section, a drummer, and assorted sound manipulators working on laptops and other digital instruments, Bjork mined the netherworlds of electronica for alt pop gold.

Clad in a flowing red and white blouse with a multicolored headdress that glowed in the dark like a neon croissant, she made sure that the visual palette matched the dazzling hues of her songs, with the brass band costumed in gaudy red, blue and yellow gowns and large crests emblazoned with frogs, birds and fish suspended from the back of the stage.

It all congealed into a fantasia of color and sound that could be as quiet as sweet nothings whispered into a lover's ear and so loud and clamorous it seemed like a Mardi Gras band was storming through the aisles of The Pearl.

Bjork's latest disc, the exquisitely splintered "Volta," is driven by a throbbing, near-tribal percussive thrush and fractured beats that ping-pong about the songs seemingly at random at times.

There's crashing, martial dust-ups like the show-opening "Earth Intruders," a clamorous din sung in a voice that's both childlike and commanding, and the searching pop kaleidoscope "Wanderlust," where Bjork testified to her shiftlessness.

"I feel at home whenever the unknown surrounds me," she sang.

"I receive its embrace aboard my floating house."

Powering through a fleet 85-minute set, Bjork alternated haunting lullabies where she sounded like an Icelandic Grace Slick ("XX") with flickering torch songs ("Pagan Poetry") and terse, ruthless rhythmic lashings ("Army of Me").

Through it all, she flung herself about the stage as if she was trying to dislodge her limbs from their sockets, grinning like a kid who's gotten away with some unpunished indiscretion.

And in a way she has: It's still kind of pleasantly bewildering than an artist as unbounded, diffuse and occasionally difficult as Bjork can pack concert halls and rack up gold albums.

But live, Bjork's populist appeal becomes a bit more evident, especially during ecstatic, arms-in-air fire starters that climaxed with ravelike intensity via fleets of diesel-powered beats barreling through the tunes.

It all ended with the same message that it began with.

"Declare independence!" Bjork shrieked at show's conclusion, bellowing until her voice cracked, sounding like a woman beholden only to her own idiosyncrasies.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin @reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0476.