Lykke Li really wants to dance. So much so that she’s even written a song about it called, imaginatively, ‘Dance, Dance, Dance’ which she opens with tonight. Yet at times during the gig she seemed increasingly frustrated by the Scala crowds unwillingness to shake their collective booty. Normally this would be my cue to lay into an artist for their inability to make the crowd anything other than static, but tonight was different; people weren’t dancing weren’t because the music was shite or even worse, boring, but because they were enthralled by this baggy-jumpered blonde sprite jerking, jumping and thrusting herself around the stage.
Despite being a fan of the tunes on her Myspace page, I was a relative Lykke virgin and went to the gig half expecting a huge dollop of Bjork-lite, watched by the beardy, bespectacled faux intelligentsia, there on their night off from pretending to watch The South Bank Show.
By the middle of the first tune I was gobbling away at my words- here was a clearly dedicated audience, excited about the chance to see Lykke for the first time since the single release of set-closer and all round belter-of-a-tune ‘Breaking It Up’.
But far from being a one song Jo, Lykke Li has a setful of bootiful, ethereal tunes. With a lot of them driven by the fantastically loud drummer, there certainly was moments when one could move one’s posterior, albeit in the floaty, squirmy way that poi-‘dancers’ do at Glastonbury. Previous single ‘A Little Bit’ did actually, as the song implores, make me fall in love with her a little bit, and got the screamers at the front moving. Rhetorically asking ‘we all feel depressed sometimes right?’ before lurching into Vampire Weekend’s ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa' was an ironical masterstroke and had all of us, or me at least, whooping along to her cover of one of this years most instantly recognisable tunes.
Despite this it was the slower moments where she really tugged at the ticker strings. ‘Tonight’ is officially a stunning song, with the echo round her fragile voice making it seem like we’re actually hearing the song in cave-produced reverb. Penultimate tune ‘I’m Good I’m Gone’ was quieter live than on record, and had me begging her not to (go, that is). And ending with ‘Breaking It Up’ was certainly the right decision, and one designed with the crowd pleasing ethos very much in mind. Backed by a hip-hop beat, flashing lights and her screaming the song’s wonderfully cynical refrain of ‘if you're going abroad I can't help you /If you're crossing the street I might be there’ through a megaphone, the crowd was properly, finally, dancing. Lykke wins, then....
Posted In Live Reviews, Oct 03 2008.
Words - David