Anderson hits home with her personal, provocative stories

Laurie Anderson performed 16 songs in a 95-minute show. (LISA POOLE for the boston globe)

For all her avant-garde reputation and coded contemplations on the human condition, Laurie Anderson remains one of our most charismatic modern storytellers, the gold standard in musical commentary. Softly chilled, a bit eerie, and uniquely curious, yes, but above all she's provocative, amusing, and friendly.

And with her new work, "Homeland," an austere, epic examination of contemporary American culture rolled out in a 16-song, 95-minute show at the Opera House Saturday night, Anderson has again mined her eccentricities in ways that are more personal and imaginative than weirdly off-putting.

The spare black stage was decorated only with small candles, bare bulbs, and the low-profile electronics of Anderson and her three musicians, also dressed in black, playing synthesizer, electric bass, and cello.

Sometimes singing, mostly speaking in her serene, measured cadence, Anderson targeted ancient songbirds, bad guys who blow up churches, strange perfumes, corrupt politicians, and the lost art of conversation. It was more social satire than political diatribe and always delivered with a poetic zeal.

"The reason I really love the stars is that we can't hurt them, but we are always reaching for them," she intoned on "Mambo & Bling" in a deep male voice courtesy of sonic processing.

Musically, "Homeland" is perhaps Anderson's most sophisticated and intriguing work. Her violin entwined in short but beautiful and gently fevered duets with Okkyung Lee's cello. Cool, almost subliminal rhythms of organic-sounding electronic samples powered the sparkle of meditations on "Transitory Life," while "Sky Flying Birds" floated over a baroque beat.

Elsewhere, Anderson was accompanied by a percolating pluck of strings both real (violin, cello, and Skuli Sverrisson's melodic bass) and sampled (part of keyboardist Peter Scherer's broad palette).

Anderson would wrap songs around reflective, almost ambient clouds of an idea before injecting more pointed observations. "Callin' Em Up," an extended antiwar groove, likened modern war to children's crusades. "The Underwear Gods" concocted a consumer-nation fantasy wherein giant models come down off their billboards to panic the constituency.

Several punches were packed into "Only an Expert," a protest song for the new millennium. Over bright disco gurgles, Anderson took barbed, humorous jabs at government smokescreens, consumerism, global warming, reality TV, torture, and colonialism.

In contrast to animated moments like "Only an Expert" and the sunny "Out of the Heart," the last third of the concert was full of blue tones and a funereal air fighting to stay above a trench filled with deep melancholy. Imagine a cool, late-night state of suspended isolation.

But Anderson can sell "bleak" as well as a humorous aside. As one audience member observed: "She can make the darkest thoughts sound like a lullaby."