Showing a sassy side

Bjork

“Volta”

(One Little Indian/Atlantic)

* * * 1/2

Bjork opens with all cylinders firing in this return to a conventional (well, everything’s relative), song-based album after the bracingly austere experiments of “Medulla.” The jubilant “Earth Intruders,” pushed by the Congolese clatter of Konono No. 1, has hooks, texture, power and propulsion, and a rousing lyric of revolution.

Nothing else on the just-released “Volta” packs that kind of punch, but even as the music settles into some of the visionary Icelandic artist’s familiar contours, she stirs in enough new ingredients to keep things moving.

The most surprising discovery is a male counterpart to her otherworldly persona. You might not have known we needed one, but Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons, turns out to be the perfect boy Bjork. It’s idiosyncrasy squared when his sorrowful warble curls like smoke around her impulsive, percussive utterances.

Their tour de force, “The Dull Flame of Desire,” ends with a rising rush of drums from Rhode Island noise-rock musician Brian Chippendale, then cuts abruptly to the electro-minimalism of “Innocence,” one of three collaborations with hip-hop eminence Timbaland. That’s an intriguing teaming, but three tracks amount to a tease, a diversion rather than a direction.

Much of the album is moved along by the sounds of ships’ horns and bells, gulls’ cries and flowing water. Bjork moves leisurely into Asian and African landscapes (famed kora player Toumani Diabate contributes there), as well as the tribal trip-hop that’s become one of her touchstones.

Though the powerful yet childlike voice and yearning lyrics are much the same, the experience is more earthly than mystical this time.

Not earthy, though. Bjork’s reveries, raptures, sonic tapestries and elegant tone poems remain sleek and celestial in bearing, and even when she’s agitating the masses (“Declare independence, don’t let them do that to you”) it’s more with punky sass than battering-ram power -- inevitably, she’s a sage against the machine.

-- Richard Cromelin

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Barbra Streisand

“Streisand: Live in Concert 2006”

(Columbia)

* * *

Streisand sounds terrific on this keepsake of last fall’s U.S. tour, but perhaps the most beautiful noise preserved here is the crowd’s delirious roar.

Certainly it’s beautiful to Streisand, who warms to it and plays around with it -- going so far as to make a couple of in-on-the-joke references to Mike Myers’ ultimate-fan creation, Linda Richman.

The double-CD concert recording samples broadly from Streisand’s five decades in show business. Her singing, throughout, is almost tactile, suggesting the luxurious smoothness of satin or the sweet kiss of a breeze on a summer day. An orchestra of 58 lushly accompanies her.

Signature songs -- “The Way We Were,” “Evergreen,” “People” -- are featured, but the true delights are the unexpected ones: the slinky, jazzy version of “Down With Love,” the free and easy stroll through “Come Rain or Come Shine” and the languorously calm, then giddily exuberant rendition of “A Cockeyed Optimist.”

Some song pairings are also intriguing: a “Funny Girl” section that includes such lesser-sung treats as the title song and “The Music That Makes Me Dance”; a message-moment mash-up of “Carefully Taught” and “Children Will Listen”; and the two-sides-of-love juxtaposition of the prickly, complicated “Unusual Way” and the quiet assurance of “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?”

The tracks have been culled from concerts in New York; Washington, D.C.; and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The tour’s notorious use of a Bush imitator is, mercifully, nowhere in evidence. Too bad the same can’t be said of the thick, gummy backup provided, now and again, by that boy band of classical singing known as Il Divo.

-- Daryl H. Miller

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Elliott Smith

“New Moon”

(Kill Rock Stars)

* * *

The biggest mistake a listener can make with Elliott Smith’s music is to search it for clues to his 2003 death. Even on his heartsick laments of drug addiction and isolation, there are glimmers of harmony or gently walking bass lines that seem to hint at better times to come.

“New Moon,” a collection of unreleased demos and outtakes from the time Smith recorded his 1997 album “Either/Or,” doesn’t answer or raise any new questions about Smith or his larger body of work. But it does reveal how thoughtful and meticulously pretty his songwriting was, even on his most intimate recordings.

Those drawn to Smith’s images of Christian Brothers liquor, crushed credit cards and devils named Angeles will have much to pore through. “High Times,” the emotional centerpiece of the album, finds Smith in his blackest mood yet on record, and plain-spoken lines such as “I don’t go where I’m supposed to go” sound like a travelogue of private, impossible pain.

But an early version of “Miss Misery,” the song whose Oscar nomination brought him unlikely fame, shows how rigorously Smith self-edited, and a winsome version of Big Star’s “Thirteen” proves that, like Tim Hardin before him, hopeless romantics can be equally both on record.

-- August Brown

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.