Lykke Li

At a time when dance music feels like an arms race of bombastic bass, ironic hooks and audaciously 80's synth, Lykke Li's debut full-length, Youth Novels, proves a compelling plea for disarmament. Forgoing the hyperbolized trappings of its contemporaries, Youth Novels warmly recalls the exhilaration of a middle school dance, with Lykke Li and Bjorn Yttling leading its attendees through bashful hip shaking and arms-length slow dances. Vocally, Li could be mistaken for Robyn's little sister, adding a coquettish shyness to the honey-dipped melodies of her Swedish contemporary. These musings pirouette through Yttlining's simplistic but equally elating sonic backdrops, which mix a core of drum and bass with a menagerie of lighthearted accoutrements ranging from toy piano to ukulele.

With this setup, the duo recreates the emotional undercurrents of adolescence and presents them in an entertaining, danceable pop package. On "Dance, Dance, Dance," Li's demure takes the spotlight over an infectious cadence drummed on pots and pans. "Easy conversations, there's no such thing, no I'm shy, shy, shy," Li confides with a lilting melancholy that can only be soothed with clumsy dance moves. Following suit, "Let It Fall" is an upbeat ode to the catharsis of crying. This outpouring flows over an infectious Casio groove reminiscent of the Tom Tom Club. The lead single, "Little Bit," ruminates on sheepish idiosyncrasies before blooming into a lush chorus where Li invokes the coy politics of schoolyard crushes, goading "I think I'm a little in love with you, but only if you're a little bit in love with me."

Youth Novels only glaring missteps come when Li steps too far from her timid persona. The tacky spoken word tracks "Melodies and Desires" and "This Trumpet In My Head" are inevitable skips on repeat listens, while the sassy-little-sister tone of "Complaint Department" proves immediately off-putting. Despite the few disposable moments, it's impossible to resist the rest of the alluring work that Li and Ytlling produced. In just under an hour, the two have managed to invoke the sordid emotional tides of youth in a nostalgic snapshot that breaks the dance music mold.

—Jay Watford
09.09.08

Advance hype fueled by the Little Bit EP had Lykke Li pegged as the next in a growing string of cool-kid-approved perfect-pop fixes to leak out from Sweden's endless supply, but Youth Novels doesn't entirely play out as expected, with neither Robyn's electronic dance-pop precision nor the affable strumming of Jens Lekman or Peter Björn and John (whose Björn Yttling handles production duties here and co-wrote every track). Although it does bear some traces of these approaches, as well as El Perro Del Mar's earnest melancholia, it's decidedly odder and harder to pin down, proffering an idiosyncratic, stripped-down vision of pop that foregrounds repetition and simplicity over familiarity or even melody (though rest assured, there is ample catchiness to be had here). The graceful symphonic layering of the beat-less, spoken-word opener "Melodies and Desires" starts things off on a deceptively lush note, but much of the album is about as instrumentally sparse as pop can get, often sounding as though it were cobbled together from a scrap yard of barely functioning instruments and non-instruments. The painfully introverted hip-shaker of "Dance Dance Dance" ("my hips they lie/cause in reality I'm shy shy shy") lilts atop an aptly minimalist groove consisting of nothing but two insistently bowed bass notes, some found-sounding percussion, and a brief sax solo, while even the assertive standout "I'm Good, I'm Gone" gets by on little more than hand claps, driving drums, a bit of vibraphone doubling, and a simple bass line pounded out on a piano's lower register. These and the similarly skeletal arrangements that make up much of the album are deployed inventively enough that they rarely feel incomplete, but they're effective mainly because they keep the focus squarely on Lykke Li's understated yet captivating vocals. It's a daringly direct approach that emphasizes Li's marked emotionality (which runs the range from tenderness to bitterness), and allows songs to succeed -- or, rarely, flounder -- on their merits. When the songwriting ideas are strong (the aforementioned pair, the sparsely funky "Let It Fall" and especially the naggingly effective "Little Bit"), stripped-down arrangements and repetitive simplicity do nothing to stem their appeal, while "Hanging High" mostly plods and even the relative fullness of "My Love," with its strings and weirdly bleating group vocal, can't do much to make up for its dud chorus. A couple of curveballs come late in the running order -- the inexplicable Spanish guitar fantasia "This Trumpet In My Head," the jittery, mostly electronic kiss-off "Complaint Department" (which is cuter than it probably ought to be, but enjoyably snarky and faux-menacing nevertheless), and finally the resoundingly poppy "Breaking It Up," which is easily the album's biggest-sounding moment, complete with strings, chunky piano and exuberantly ramshackle group vocals. Brimming with ideas but understated, even tentative in executing them, and big on hooks but nervously intimate in presentation, Youth Novels is a curious, decidedly unorthodox but endearing record. Both youthful and novel -- Li was twenty-one upon its release, which may explain both her occasional goofy vocal affectations and the hesitant freshness of her sound -- it's hard to pigeonhole but refreshingly easy to enjoy. ~ K. Ross Hoffman, All Music Guide