Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

(originally published by The Student)

In 2008 a fresh-faced Lykke Li Zachrisson told the Guardian why she no longer want to be a dancer- “I want to be on stage and travel the world and live passionately and have love affairs and get drunk.” Since debut Youth Novels, Lykke Li has toured the world, ticking boxes one and two, and with this album sings through the other three.

The new album Wounded Rhymes takes its name from a line in one of the last and most mellow songs on the album- Sadness is a Blessing. Here she uses melodies and lyrics reminiscent of a 60s girl-band, with lines like “Sadness is my boyfriend / Oh, Sadness, I'm your girl”. An otherwise decent song is weakened by Li's voice, which here sounds sickly-sweet rather than the more sinister melodies heard elsewhere.

First track Youth Knows No Pain opens with a darkly energetic style which introduces us to the heavy, tribal-sounding drums that dominate the album. But at times this backbeat seems all too obvious, and it's only the folky Unrequited Love in which it doesn't make an appearance- by which time it won't be missed. Instead it's replaced by a lower register for the singer and footstep sounds as a kind of relief.

The first two singles from the album, Get Some and I Follow Rivers, are obsessive in sentiment and explicit in lyric. The first sees Li announcing “I'm your prostitute / You're gonna get some”, and the second is best with its video, showing a black-shrouded figure chasing a man across a snowy plain.

Mixing earthy bongos with ethereal synthesisers, the 24-year-old Swede provides a well-rounded sound paired with a kind of Native-American Psychadelia which would be just as at home in a club as on the freezing streets of Ystad.

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