Putting the Inner Child at Center Stage

THE SUGARCUBES

“Stick Around for Joy”

Elektra * * * Bjork Gudmundsdottir is the Edie Brickell of the Arctic, a willfully waif-like singer who loves to put the inner child smack in the middle of the stage. While Brickell’s laid-back naivete can smack of indulgent infantilism, the Sugarcubes’ compelling context and sense of adventure capture the bliss and seriousness of life’s innocent age.

The Icelandic band’s third album is a major recovery from the misstep of 1989’s “Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week,” returning to the melodious, richly textured sound and Freudian lyric slant of the group’s ’88 debut and easing lead shouter Einar Orn closer to the sidelines.

With Gudmundsdottir the uncontested centerpiece, “Stick Around for Joy” jumps and soars with eccentric imagination and playful twists. Her voice--with virtually no body, but great power--can dissolve into molecules of pure delight, and its little-girl inflections regularly give way to superhuman swoops.

There’s something faintly erotic in her expressed hunger for new experience--the pervasive theme here is breaking free. It can be ominous too, and it’s not always so faint (cf. “Walkabout”).

The band’s music drives pretty hard, but it’s as thick and fuzzy as a stuffed animal, and it moves with quirky gaits, like something Jim Henson might have designed. When the gruff Einar comes stomping in to bark in excited counterpoint to Gudmundsdottir’s reveries, it’s like the recurring entrance of a beast in “Peter & the Wolf.”

At last, alternative rock for kids of all ages.