Welcome visitors from Planet Bjork

[Guest blogger Margaret Wappler doesn't have a swan dress like Bjork's but she does have a few of Matthew Barney's "Cremaster Cycle" movies in her Netflix cue so give her a break, will ya?]

After a day of one guitar-driven boy band after another (yeah, I'm talking to you, Arctic Monkeys), Bjork's closing set of otherworldly orchestra-industrial pop was a welcome shot of theater. It was that certain alien-meets-Norse-goddess element that signals you've entered Bjork country. Or more like she's invaded yours. On the main stage bedecked in mysterious flags, Bjork and crew launched a coup d' etat with the Timbaland-assisted track from her hotly anticipated upcoming album, jumping around in a colorful headdress and wailing over a willfully paralyzed beat.

And so the enchanted ragtag performance continued. The Icelandic princess sent chills up the spine with pitch-perfect eerie versions of several songs off of "Homogenic" and other landmark albums, supported by an all-female brass band dressed in gauzy tapestries of turquoise, chartreuse and coral. The ladies, representatives from the femininity-as-cult concept, looked as if they'd washed up on some impossibly somber shore. Their guide to Coachella backcountry danced around in bare feet, her cherubic smirk genuine and delectible.

The video screens flanking the stage spent a lot of time on her ultra-techie sound equipment. We might be too heat-stroked to describe, but it involved lots of tactile hand-movements that apparently manipulated the dramatic washes of sound. But what held our attention more? Bjork's pulsating, robot-in-sluggish-heat version of "Army of Me," replete with lasers pulsating from the stage. It felt like a precursor to what might portend for Rage's set: '90s personalized rebellion, with the war in Iraq casting it as sharper and flintier as ever.

Bjork comes close but fails to lick her nose during closing set. Photo by Spencer Weinter / LAT.

Comments

[Jesse]

Björk is awesome.