Friday, May 27, 2011

Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes

Some music is good because you don't even realize you're listening to it. It becomes sort of a background mood of your life when you're listening to it, and although it doesn't work to pull you into its world, it grafts itself organically onto yours. By the end of Lykke Li's Wounded Rhymes, I think I've tuned out, but I've been bopping and nodding my head and snapping my fingers.

It's rhythmic. It's propulsive, but not explosive, if that makes any sense (I generally assume little of what I say does.) The album sets its strategy out with its stirring opener, "Youth Knows No Pain," easily one of the best tracks on a great album. It has a catchy, fiery chorus that builds to the evocative statement of the title, which can be interpreted a few different ways: either youth is invincible, or thinks it is, or that despite its complaints, youth is oblivious to the real pain it will someday know when it grows. I'm not of the lyrical-interpretation school of criticism, though: what a song is actually saying means less to me than the feeling that something's been stirred up. And with that thundering percussion and those distant vocals, and that snakelike organ, the song hits a real dark spot, head on.

There's an insistence in the rhythm of the album, an awareness of it. Sometimes it progresses easily, but just as often it draws attention to a jagged, rough tempo, like on "I Follow Rivers," whose chorus stutters and doubles back on itself. Like most of the album it features thunderous drums and nifty counterpoints. Something about this song seems wonderfully cracked or broken. All throughout the work, it invokes what white people like me think of as being primal or tribal... the idea that whatever pain and anguish being expressed is more legitimate or direct than what you might find on, say, a modern soul album. "Rivers" bleeds well into the sweet, windswept "Love Out of Lust."

A couple of the songs work in a classic wall-of-sound pop. I had to double-check the liner notes for "Unrequited Love" to make sure Zooey Deschanel was not drafted to do backing vocals. She wasn't, but the the backup singers on that one (Zhala Rifat and Mariam Wallentin) add a certain early-60's feel, intentionally invoked with a refrain of "Shoo-wop-shoo-waaaaaa". It's also at a country waltz tempo, and is probably the best vocal showcase for Li herself, as she handles longer stretches of that song than others, I believe, a capella. I like those passages, because her voice seems so fragile, like she could just flat out break down in the middle of a note, singing "Once again it's happeninnnnnnnnnnnn / Alllllllll my love is un-re-qui-ted...." Here and on "I Know Places," she just lets herself go out there. Other times, she puts up her guard, and it works equally well. That song swells into a nearly-separate track of ambient music. Another great classic-pastiche is "Sadness is a Blessing," one of the moments where Li's vocals soar best, not as vulnerably as in "Unrequited," but opening for a more defiant, anthemic stance, when she sings, "Sadness I'm your girl," embracing a feeling we've all had and fought, but where would we be without it? I love songs like this because as much as lyrics have grown since the days of the Brill Building and hits like "He's a Rebel" or "Then He Kissed Me," song composition rarely approaches the kind of beauty -- not the "level" but certainly the flavour -- those ones were capable of. That said, "Da Do Ron Ron" is still an excellent tune.

She shields herself with echoey vocals and those amazing drums. I call them not amazing because they're so technically good (I wouldn't know "technically good" if you showed me a formula,) but because they're used excellently to get that atmosphere of driving force, pulling through loneliness and despair, on the run in a track like "Get Some," where Li disappears into the background of the wall of sound, the voice merely being one of the many instruments. Great.

The album ends strongly, with the arresting "Jerome" and "Silent My Song," which seems to drag you slowly across the floor with its long, languid chorus, and sweet harmonies that show why lyrics don't always need to be words. As I mentioned, you can zone out while listening to this album, and then this song might jolt you back to it, and cause a bit of realization of what you've spent the last 40 minute hearing. It sounds huge.

How do we express sadness? Is it in the quiet, like a Nick Drake album, or is it by piling every conceivable sound in there and drawing it out? There's no set path, of course, and I think the great thing about this album is that it plays with different ways of getting to similar ideas. Shields up, shields down, sarcasm, directness, sincerity, thundering drums, slithering organs, show everything, show nothing, acapella, harmonies... Li tries all these tihngs and never sounds different from herself, which of course is the mark of a great album. Actually, I take that back, the mark of a great album is that it sounds great. It does. And it makes you feel like you're feeling something.

Now... how would you pronounce her first name?

Buy this album from iTunes now!

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