For the Icelandic avant-pop rogues the Sugarcubes, paradox isn't just a state of mind; it's an art form. A large part of their energy and allure comes from the power of juxtaposition: teaming the sweet spectral coo of singer Björk Gudmundsdottir with the sour sing-Sprache of Einar Örn; jazzing up dark impressionist verse with jittery dance-floor maneuvers; writing love songs that equate romantic obsession with, among other things, indigestion and drowning.

Like Lifes Too Good, the Sugarcubes' bewitching 1988 debut, Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week is rich in eccentric contrast and playful contradiction. In "Tidal Wave," Björk equates her pent-up emotions with an impending storm while Einar feeds his own ennui with a heady whiff of poisonous harbor air and the rhythm Cubes navigate a choppy reggae undertow. "Dream T.V." is a delightful nightmare that may or may not be a parable about sexual hunger and illusion. But there are no maybes about the charge you get from Thor Eldon's clattering guitar and Björk's bright, wordless whoops.

While the Sugarcubes often delight in perversity for its own sake (the culinary goof "Eat the Menu," Einar's murderous rants "Nail" and "Shoot Him"), there is careful method in their mischief, a purposeful spirit born of punk but nurtured by singular Icelandic traditions in literature and pagan superstition. In challenging your fundamental notions of absurdity, the band is really testing pop's capacity for storytelling and dramatic expression. And typically, it's the band's darkest moods that glow with wit and perception. "Pump" is a frightful ode to emotional cannibalism and willful sacrifice heightened by a ghostly flutelike solo and Björk's masochistic pleading: "Eat me love.... I, on your tongue/You gulp me/Then down your gullet/In the stomach you splash acid on me." The sublime beauty of "Water," with its gentle rippling rhythm, belies treachery at work – a lover drowned and abandoned, trapped under ice.

Casual Cubes fans fixated on the jaw-dropping beauty of the band's debut single "Birthday" may find some of the melodic and lyric pretzel logic – not to mention the increased intensity of Einar's vocal mannerisms – on Here Today daunting. But that tension is central to the Sugarcubes' sound and vision. Besides, contemporary pop already suffers from a surfeit of the obvious. In a world dominated by cookie-cutter dance tracks and AOR rock-by-numbers, the Cubes' love of weird is some kind of wonderful. (RS 566)

DAVID FRICKE