You can’t pronounce her name properly and, aptly, neither does her music trip off the tongue in any kind of conventional sense. Well, not your tongue. It lilts off hers, but then she, like her music, is a mystery, an enchanting whip of fantasy and fleeting reality, petite, dainty, unobtrusive. While Swedish chanteuse Lykke Li Zachrisson has her roots variously in glistening folk music, ambient electronica and cloud-hopping vocal pop, this is not an album that cries out to be categorised. It exists in a dream-space where strands of melody, percussive sprites and optimistic spirits meet, entwine and then dart off in their respective directions. No one song seems so heavy handed that it directly seeks to make an impression, though of course they do, all of them in the end are like fireflies that can’t be caught but nonetheless burn a lasting imprint on your vision, staying with you long after the moment.
The nearest direct comparison is with Bat For Lashes’ melodious white magic, lingering, exploring, given continued life through ritualistic pulse-like beats, in this case stylised and effected to pleasing minimalist ends. The gorgeous chamber-harpsichord of ‘Handing High’ and loopy ‘Complaint Department’ answer to those charges to varying degrees (the former organically, the latter more artificially). ‘Dance Dance Dance’ is a calypso-jazz Sugarcubes, she herself a light husky cross between Bjork and Victoria Bergmann of The Concretes, ‘Let It Fall’ is reduced hip-hop Peter Bjork & John style (Björn Yttling produces) and the amazing ‘Tonight’, all 80s atmospheric drums, ambient strings and Cyndi Lauper vocal stretching, all of which amounts to an album packed full of diversions and perspective-banding mirrors. One you’ll get lost in but never search for the exit sign.
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