I will say this about Lykke Li: she’s a little moppet of frenzied charm, that’s what she is. We’re all crammed like sardines at the back of Webster Hall when I hand my friend Gabe the camera and instruct him to snap a few pictures. “I can’t get a good shot,” he screams. “She won’t stop moving!” And that pretty much sums it up.
The show opened with repeating bars of “Melodies & Desires” and a stage drowning in white light, then Lykke appeared, easily shifted into “Dance, Dance, Dance” and the crowd obeyed her decree. If you’ve ever seen our little Swedish songstress play live, you know she can’t resist joining the percussion section and often performs the whole show with a drumstick in one hand, a kazoo in the other. (I am dying to know WHY a kazoo? How does this happen? One day you wake up and think, “I’m going to play this kazoo on stage tonight”? Don’t get me wrong. I think it is completely fantastic. It just makes me insanely curious as well.) So she rocked the kazoo for this number and then played one of my favorite songs off Youth Novels “I’m Good, I’m Gone” while stopping to shout, “I have two drummers!” and gleefully crashing on their cymbals one after the other. She’s wild.
Yet, as always with Lykke Li, what I find most effective is her ability to be utterly venerable when she sings. This was the case on both “Little Bit” and “Tonight.” The way she grips the mic and looks directly into the eyes of the audience make you feel not only like it’s the first time she’s ever performed the song (although it’s most likely creeping it’s way into the hundreds) but perhaps she just broke up with someone before stumbling out on stage. It’s as if the lyrics are breaking her heart right there. She has the capability to show an intense amount of emotion, which I find an unusual, unnerving, and profoundly captivating part of her performance. It’s hard to take your eyes off her.
I would, however, have liked a longer set. She continuously throws in other repertoire, including the hook to Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” and a beautiful version of “Tears on My Pillow.” (”I’m gonna sing you a lullaby,” she says. She’s so frickin’ cute!) Regardless, the show only lasted just over an hour. For an encore, she performed the appropriate New York-centric “Can I Kick It?” which was pretty fantastic but would have been more fantastic if I had not already seen this at the 2008 Woodie Awards when Q-Tip was like… uh… actually there with her. I sort of have this craving for her to go produce three more albums at which point I will be buying front row seats. I think that she is an artist with enough depth to have a lasting career and can only imagine what her shows will look like when she has a larger cache of work to pull from.
But I will leave you with this thought. As Lykke’s on stage sipping whiskey and screaming at the audience, “Why are you so quiet?! Aren’t you American?! Don’t you know the words to this song?!” one of the girls standing next to me turns to her friends and exclaims, “Isn’t she so crazy? Don’t you just like… wanna be friends with her!”
Yes please.
