Bjork Swirls Through Challenging Musical Landscape

Eccentric alternative-pop singer Bjork rose from Iceland’s untrammeled musical ground to become a genre unto herself--a star of her own passionate, provocative, seductive one-woman show. At the sold-out Hollywood Palladium on Saturday, the singer swirled club-kid culture, experimental jazz, anarchic punk, diva-centric dance and howling blues into one intoxicating and sophisticated cocoon.

Sharing the stage with an eight-piece string section and a deejay who issued booming dance beats, the pixie-like Bjork skipped around in a diaphanous white dress that made her look like a fairy. Translucent material hung around the stage shimmered for an ethereal, ice-and-water effect.

The scenery might have been serene, but most of the songs were anything but. Bjork dived right into her more challenging and dark songs, including the stealthy, primal “Hunter,” from her latest album, “Homogenic,” and the mythic “Isobel,” from her 1995 collection, “Post.” Both songs probe the depths and soaring ecstasies of experience.

Appearing almost blase about her arresting performance, she seemed as if she could perform this material while sleepwalking. That didn’t make it any less fascinating to hear: The strings and samples mixed with the gut-thumping, floor-shaking beats to create an intoxicating web of sound.

Bjork picks and chooses some of the best that the musical landscape has to offer, taking references from all over the map, from the propulsive, heart-quickening pace of jungle to lofty classical and emotive, loose-limbed jazz.

Though she’s terrific at rifling through fringe cultures, Bjork’s unique voice is always the highlight, and it peaked Saturday with the guttural intensity of “5 Years,” with its lines, “I dare you to take me on. . . . I’m so bored of cowards that say what they want, then they can’t handle love.” In one vocal stroke, she managed to communicate deep, primordial yearning and childlike playfulness while acknowledging that she might always have to combat loneliness as an artist--and as a human being.

Most of Bjork’s songs seem to come from someone who attacks life with an enormous hunger and wild imagination and who is, not surprisingly, often disappointed by reality. To combat her blues, Bjork carves out her own emotional region, which gives everything she does an otherworldly feel. At the Palladium, it translated into a genre-smashing set that pushed the emotional and stylistic limits of popular music.