Youth Novels [CD]

While at first it’s tempting to bracket youthful Stockholm pop starlet Lykke Li and her fine debut album Youth Novels in with Annie and Robyn and all those other blog-friendly Scandinavian pop songstresses, in all truthfulness it’s not a comparison that quite works. While those artists take a quite glossy, polished approach to pop artistry, Youth Novels sometimes feels quite makeshift in its design: an experimental record, albeit one that attempts to make sweet, addictive songs from unusual or unconventional elements. At first, you worry that her voice is too slight: on "Dance Dance Dance" she sounds childlike and slight, backed by little but looped percussion and thrumming bass –- but the song gradually, majestically finds its feet, as first a madly soloing saxophone and then a full choir spirits in to her aid. And as it turns out, Lykke Li is actually a pretty tough cookie. "Little Bit" is superb confessional pop, a wispy lament over the lover that values you less than you value them, while "Complaint Department" is a wonderfully stern electro rattle built from fuzzy bass and tense drums, and a fabulously terse delivery: "If you want to complain/We are not the complaints department". Not that you will, of course: Youth Novels is a touching, intelligent debut, well worthy of attention.--Louis Pattison

Having wanted to release album before her 20th birthday, this Swedish singer/songwriter managed to realise her ambitions shortly afterwards, at the tender age of 22. Lykke Li Zachrisson may have already come to your attention through MySpace or an entrancing appearance on Jools Holland's Later... TV show earlier this year, and this solid debut album lives up to the promising groundwork.

Lykke Li sings her catchy pop confections in a breathy, girlish voice that falls somewhere between her angst-filled compatriot Stina Nordenstam on effective anti-depressants and the candy-flavoured bleat of Altered Images' Clare Grogan.

Her youthful optimism and vulnerability are offset by mentor, producer and co-writer Björn Yttling's sparse, minimalist arrangements of piano, keyboard drones, rippling acoustic guitar, inventive percussion and electronica. The occasional use of atmospheric trumpet and sax also suggests the influence of Norwegian nu jazzers like Nils Petter Molvaer.

If there's a potentially for a major hit on the album, it has to be the metronomic, infectiously hummable single Little Bit - a great new example of the emotional conflict which 10cc and Smokey Robinson lyrically documented so well.

Although it's more of a grandiose ballad, the pulsing, hypnotic Tonight has an equally catchy chorus. And while Everybody But Me convincingly plumbs the depths of adolescent insecurity, the deadpan, robotic delivery on Complaint Department shows Lykke has a sense of humour, as well as a love of vintage electro, something that's also apparent on Breaking It Up.

OK, so I'm Good, I'm Gone appears to borrow a substantially from Allen Toussaint's Working In A Coalmine, and some might find the little-girl-lost vocal mannerisms and melodrama of Time Flies a little overdone. But overall, the standard of song writing is high, the sequencing instills a sense of emotional narrative, and Yttling's imaginatively varied settings furnish a stylish and engaging showcase for this novel youth. --Jon Lusk

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"When you're dancing, you free your emotions and say things you can't with words. You'd never tell how shy I am if you saw how I dance..."

The album `Youth Novels', in all its minimalist brilliance, was recorded with Bjorn over the last 10 months.`Youth Novels' weaves its way through 14 perfectly-realised chapters. You'll hear harpsichords, flutes, and theremins throughout the album but you'll also hear Lykke Li's magnificently brittle, candy coated vocals. The record is like a well-thumbed paperback which falls open, again and again, on the same pages: love, loneliness, frustration and obsession. The chronicles of LL's life so far, told with unusual honesty. It includes recent single `Little Bit' (released to much acclaim on Moshi Moshi earlier this year), continues with the punchy throb of `I'm Good I'm Gone', and brilliant tracks like reluctant breakup anthem `Breaking It Up', Let It Fall' and `Hanging High'. Throughout, there's a sense of momentum and a pursuit of some unobtainable goal. "I don't think I'll ever be satisfied and calm," Lykke Li admits. "Even now I wonder how I'm going to live a whole lifetime, feeling how I do now..."

If you're wondering where Lykke Li (first name Lykke Li, surname Zachrisson)'s fidgety, keep-on-moving attitude began, let's rewind 22 years to the very beginning of her nomadic life. We're in northern Europe and Chernobylised clouds have chosen to dump their radioactive rain down on Stockholm. A new sense of environmental consciousness grips the country and her parents - Lykke Li's mother a photographer, her father a musician - move first from the city to the country and then, selling everything they own, they move to Portugal, where they buy land and build a house in small village in the mountains. As the years tick by the family move to Lisbon, then back to Sweden. Every year the family escape Sweden's gloomy winters to India, then return in the summer. Her passport may be Swedish, but Lykke Li is from a little bit of everywhere with a perfect balance of city and suburb that pours from the organic, digital feel of her songs. Lykke Li danced her way through childhood. When she was five, when her most prized possession was a cassette of Madonna's `Immaculate Collection' hits album, this Little Miss Sunshine would slap makeup on her face, stuff a bra and put on dance shows for her family based on the entire album, taking in everything from `Like A Virgin' to `Erotica'. Lykke Li says. "I hated my school and everyone in it. `Dance Dance Dance' is a song about dancing away the silence and the awkwardness." By her teens she was dancing on Swedish TV, backing up other artists. "Then I made things difficult for myself, like I always do. All my friends were dancing, but I stopped that. My dream had been to dance, but I was bored of it. I was writing songs and decided to start singing, but I sucked." So she joined a gospel choir. By this point artists like Prince and Kate Bush were on the radar: fantastical eccentrics with extraordinary, otherworldly talents. "I seek comfort in artists like that, and even Edith Piaf, because I read about them and think `yes, someone feels like me'," LL smiles. "I feel inspired by people who feel different." The influence of that Madonna cassette was not forgotten, either: when she was 18 Lykke Li decided that she would finish school, move to New York and become a singer. Once she arrived in New York, the 19-year-old gave herself three months. One night, during a spot at the legendry SOB's club, a punter shouting "Get this white girl off the stage!" prompted the audience to boo Lykke Li out of the building. "The next day I knew I'd experienced the worst," she recalls. "I was happy, somehow. You need to do that stuff before you can be a real artist." She changed tactics - she reinvented herself, turning up at venues glammed up, claiming to be a huge Swedish star who was, as Lykke Li puts it, "tired of all the attention". She wrote a fictional biography and had photos taken. "I was a Swedish superstar," Lykke Li grins. "I'd sung on every stage." The plan started working... Then her visa ran out. When she returned to Stockholm her family was in India for Christmas. Lykke Li spent the long, dark winter days working in a retirement home, clearing up sick. "I'd just sit there," she recalls, "thinking `fucking hell'." One day, in between thinking `fucking hell' and wondering how she'd ever earn enough money to get back to New York, she started fiddling around with her songs. The next week she set up a MySpace page and almost instantly people around the world started paying attention. One producer told her that her demos sucked and put her in touch with his friend Bjorn. Bjorn was busy. Lykke Li kept calling him, once a week, every week, for three months. "Eventually," she remembers, "he said, `let's do a demo', but then his band blew up and he was away all the time." Lykke Li managed to grab a few hours with Bjorn every few weeks - he'd have been in LA or Japan promoting `Young Folks' while she'd been clearing up after old folks. "My life was fading away!" she laughs. "I was going `I'm twenty! I'm going to be twenty one in a month!' He told me I was crazy." Once again, Lykke Li's impatience took hold. She went back to developing her own songs, producing them and putting them on MySpace, where word was beginning to spread and songs were being hungrily devoured by bloggers. At her first proper gig, with beats played off an iPod, a journalist who wrote a glowing, `star in the making'-style review for a Swedish paper. The ball was rolling, and once again, Lykke Li had been the mistress of her own destiny. "You have to do everything yourself," she says, matter-of-factly. "I never trust people to do things, because they never do. Except for Bjorn." As it happens, despite his frequent absences, Bjorn had seen something quite special in Lykke Li and, as time went by and he was able to spend more time developing tracks on `Youth Novels', a close bond developed. "I've always wanted to find a genius who thinks I'm a genius," she laughs, "and a lot of my album is there as a result of Bjorn seeing something in me - he knew I was never going to be a big singer like Christina Aguilera, standing there and wailing."

For Lykke Li, a born perfectionist with a hands on approach to everything from songwriting and artwork through to marketing, things were close to getting out of control. "I only had four songs and I was doing all these festival gigs, getting this hype! Everything was getting too big!" In October 2007, she returned to New York to finish recording her album.