Have you ever stepped into a venue, looked around at the people inside and seriously wondered if you were in the right place? Although I knew her songs were poppy and more easily digestible than, say, Deerhoof, the instant I walked into the Showbox I knew that I had vastly underestimated the fans Lykke Li attracts; to my left were a couple who may have ironically been trying to recreate the general aesthetic of Studio 54, and to my right were a couple who didn’t need to ironically recreate anything because they apparently never left the coke-tinged heyday of the ’70′s.
To make matters worse, Lykke Li’s opening group was called Wildbirds & Peacedrums, and their sound was as engrossing and revolutionary as their idiotic name. Peacedrums could best be summarized as what one imagines Feist would sound like if she took up yodeling and decided to lead a drum circle. Behind me, two pot addled gents had a conversation that centered around which long ago musical celebrity would be the most interesting to see come on stage right then: “Dude, wouldn’t it be amazing if, like, Jimmy Page just, you know, walked across the stage right now??” “No, man, Freddie Mercury would be way better!” I left after they almost got into a fist fight over one mistaking Julian Casablancas of the Strokes for Craig Nicholls from the Vines.
When Lykke Li finally entered the stage to a soundscape of arpeggiated chimes, I couldn’t have been more relieved. Starting things off with a bang, Li held her glockenspiel in hand while she pleaded with the crowd to “dance, dance, dance” before the band finally waltzed on-stage and took things up a notch. While her debut album was a relatively sparse, minimal affair, Li’s live set-up is full of wide expanses of sound and intense dynamic peaks and ebbs, her backing band coming across like equal parts Dirty Three and the Attractions, capable of getting both the bar-stars in the audience and the American Apparel photo models to shake their asses with abundance and then granting both the occasional opportunity to mellow out.
And Lykke Li herself commanded the stage with one of the most bizarre live personas I’ve ever seen. It was almost as if her inspiration was to take the aesthetic of the Jawas from Star Wars and the chest thumping, braggadocio of the sorely missed Ol’ Dirty Bastard. It may not have been apparent on her debut, but Li knows her way around old school hip-hop, as the many instances of her breaking into the Swedish version of “flow” and the brief bits of Lil’ Wayne’s “A Milli” she threw into her set can attest. But Lykke Li cribbed more than moves and rhymes from the hip-hop world for her set, she also threw in a generous portion of bubbly synths, four to the floor electronic beats, and sequenced and appropriately pitch-shifted backing vocals to grind against her indie oriented backing band.
Not that it was all one non-stop dance party. Li’s cover of the Kings of Leon’s “Knocked Up” had a gently chugging rhythm to it but her too-young-to-sound-so-tortured voice kept the middle of the set firmly rooted in morning-after guilt territory, and her surprise cover of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?” during the encore was a brilliantly mellow close to the evening, despite the sorority girls nearby wondering why she was playing a song from the local classic rock station but not singing its verses.
Live, Lykke Li proved herself in a way that, for me at least, her debut album didn’t; her set was well-paced and surprising, her command of her band and the stage leagues beyond her peers and even some professionals who have been at this whole business for far longer than she’s even been alive. While some of it is surely from the epic touring she has taken on since the release of her debut, it’s also immediately clear that Li is a performer with not just potential, but immense staying power. If she’s able to wrangle some of the ferocity of these recent live performances when she goes to record her sophomore album, there’s a good chance we’re seeing a new leader of the Europop scene emerging.
by Morgan Davis
[Photos:Alice Reyburn]
