Lykke Li: TLA 5/16/11

As she signs my friend's shoe, Claire Boucher casually states that Lykke Li, "sounded a lot better today than she did last night." Claire Boucher--aka Grimes, Lykke Li's opening act-- chatted with my friends and I as we stood outside Theater of the Living Arts after the show, hoping Lykke Li would make an appearance to chat with a few lingering fans. Lykke Li did make a brief appearance and we exchanged a few words (she's actually quite bashful), but they were mostly pleasantries before she was rushed to a waiting cab.

I've been pretty lucky with the past few shows I've seen because the opening acts have been consistently good, but Grimes probably takes the cake (check out her song "Vanessa"). I'd never heard of her before this night and was pleasantly surprised with her bass and beat heavy dance-pop. The most impressive part of her show was that she did everything herself with a loop machine and keyboard, layering her own voice with effects and timing each instrumental part with a perfectly timed press of a button.

After Grimes' relatively simple one-woman setup, Lykke Li's was quite impressive. She dominated the stage space with five backing members, all dressed in black, and black curtains hanging from the ceiling. The stage was constantly filled with smoke too, making it really feel like the audience was witnessing some sort of ritual. Piercing through the smoke were some powerful strobe and overhead lights that kept with the monochromatic trend--they were typically either bright white or off.

These lights contributed to one of the coolest stage entrances I've seen in a long time, signaling an element of theatricality that would persist throughout the show. Smoke covered the stage as the instrumental outro to "I Know Places" blared with intermittent bursts of light for about a minute and a half before the band members took their places, followed by Lykke Li herself.

She was dressed entirely in black with a billowing cloak, making her look like some sort of phantom priestess. The way she swayed and stomped around the stage, occasionally banging on some cymbals or semi-dancing with the mic-stand, meant all eyes were focused on her--and her eyes were on the audience. Most artists I've seen tend to close their eyes when they perform or, at the least, not look at the audience. But not Lykke Li, who rarely broke eye contact with the audience. She also had very few words for the audience between songs and preferred to let her music do the talking.

The majority of her set was material from her second and best-so-far album Wounded Rhymes (take a look at single "Get Some"), but she included a lot of the best material from Youth Novels as well. Perhaps the most visually stunning part of the performance was towards the end of her set when she and her band did a cover of "Silent Shout" by fellow Swedes The Knife. Lykke Li lay down in the center of the stage as a barrage of strobes assaulted the audience as she slowly rose to dance within one of the many hanging curtains.

The final song she performed was the ballad "Unrequited Love" from her latest album--a lament for love that's never reciprocated. Though it's a sad song, I can't help but find some humor in the situation it was being performed in: the audience clearly loved Lykke Li this night and reciprocated everything she gave--and then some.