It’s been a good few years, musically, for Sweden-which in Blog-time pretty much amounts to several hundred decades. If you check the HypeCalendar, I’m fairly certain you’ll find it inscribed in binary that Peter, Bjorn and John discovered America. I dispute: everyone knows the Dreijer siblings did, duh.
It feels like it’s been ages since there was a tune that had me so possessed that I literally had to spend an entire evening fighting the urge to rush here to post it, tossing and turning all night attempting to construct textual support for a drooling, insane love for both song AND singer. Every time it’s happened recently, I can usually pinpoint it to one country of origin. Ok, two: Berlin or Sweden.
Last night I fell in love again. All things go, right? All things go. This time, however, it’s more than a fleeting, passing interest. This time I’m crushing hard-x-core on a little (surprise!) Swede going by the name of Lykke Li.
It started with a tossed-off blog comment somewhere, extolling the virtues of Sweden’s answer to Britney Spears without the meltdown Robyn, and her “hey I know that damn record must be out in the states by now because I got three different versions of it from Soulseek” self-titled album. Try as I might, I can’t write this without discussing Robyn, so I’ll try to keep this commentary contained to this paragraph, and to a minimum:
If you’ve missed the blog-clamor about Swedish pop singer Robyn and Robyn, her long-delayed album, fuhgeddaboudit-it’s all a bunch of hooey-hype. Robyn’s voice leaves a lot to be desired, the music’s not that interesting, and, frankly, if you want a futuristic piece of robo-pop without, say, Janelle Monae’s intense desire to funk around and tell stories, go buy the new Britney Spears record. It stands head and shoulders above anything Robyn puts voice to, though she did sit behind the boards for some of it. Robyn, basically, is the Swedish Butch Walker: keep both of ‘em away from the mic but let them stand behind the scenes and finesse to their little talented-but-misguided hearts’ content.
There. Still with me? Good.
The point of that rant was that Lykke Li was mentioned as, essentially, “some weird Swedish chick who got OMFG ROBYN in a video with her OMFG ROBYN”, etc etc. I clicked on this “video”, and what I saw has become what I’ve been humming for about 24 straight hours now (yes, this includes in my sleep):
This is the video for an acoustic version of “I’m Good I’m Gone”, a song from Lykke Li’s literally-JUST-released-in-Sweden album Youth Novels. Coming across like a half-nuts, precious-voiced, wide-eyed and drunkenly seductive Swedish Hot Tin Jug Band Tent Revival Party (or Arcade Fire), Lykke and her band of assembled hometown all-stars (folks from Shout Out Louds and the Concretes, as well as, yes, Robyn, looking like a post-menopausal Heinrich Malfoy) stomp, shout and bring the freaking house down. Channeling Lee Dorsey’s “Workin’ in a Coal Mine” into a dance-revival ode to choosing the love of the crowd over the love of a lover, the refrain of “I know your hands will clap” is the understatement of the year. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ll love anyone who starts a song using a bullhorn. Maybe it’s the fact that, coming from that bullhorn, I never expected Lykke’s voice to sound that silken, seductive and addictive. Maybe maybe maybe, one thing’s for certain: I immediately attempted to hunt down information a stateside release of, well, anything she’s ever done, and to no avail. As such, I have no qualms with sharing, with the desire to actually give money to this sound once the option for those of us not in Sweden exists.
THE BULLHORN WAS A VOCODER. That’s the first realization I pulled from this, the studio/electronic version of “I’m Good I’m Gone”. The second was that it would be impossible to pick a “favorite” version of this song, were the studio and live/acoustic to be placed next to one another. I should know-I tried for about three hours last night, and finally decided, after some Vodka-Grapefruits, to give up. This version’s a little stompier on the low-end, and, surprisingly, a little more lo-fi, with the haunted ghost of schaeffel-tech strutting its’ red lips and heels throughout the beat.
A track from her first EP, and something that I, believe, has the involvement of Bjorn from the aforementioned Swede PB&J whistleboys. It’s her phrasing, her cadence, in this song that made my jaw drop-when she wraps her voice around the opening verse, she has the kind of voice that Ne-Yo or Chris Brown would drop grands to either co-op or blatantly rip off. The acoustilectronic, sighing gray of the undercurrent sweeps her along with tiny, pretty keys and wistfulness. “Everybody But Me”’s a lament in a smoke-filled club, a thinking person’s Zero 7 jam all Reese’s-ed up with some R Kelly flow. Pure, utter genius, and beautiful genius at that.
There’s more, much much more, where that came from, but for now Youth Novels is still bedding down in my brain, various snippets of chorus at times surfacing to make each song a favorite until the next track comes on. This is the sort of jaw-dropping stuff that grows and then sticks. It’s only a matter of time, really, ’til I know my hands will clap again.
pretty sure she aint swedish, norwegian if im not mistaken.