Shepherd's Bush Empire, London
Once the darling of indie bloggers, Lykke Li is edging into the mainstream: she wrote a track for the teen-vampire flick New Moon, and another of her songs is to be covered on Glee. But if this Swedish composer of all things hauntingly off-kilter is going to become the property of late-adopting Gleeks, she is not about to succumb quietly. The Li who faces a sold-out Empire spends the set engulfed in shadows created by flickering orange lights, intoning as mournfully as her small, airy voice allows. Glee or not, this seems to imply, she still needs the privacy of dim lighting to sing her deeply felt songs of unrequited love.
One is even called Unrequited Love; here, it turns up as the encore, after a set filled with titles such as Sadness Is a Blessing and Youth Knows No Pain. Much of the setlist is from her album Wounded Rhymes, written in the aftermath of a romantic breakup, and the on-stage mood accordingly swings between defiance and disbelief. The naked ballads such as I Know Places are striking enough, but when her band colour in the sound with electronics, sinuous basslines and cross-rhythms produced by two drummers ? an effect that recalls especially florid 60s pop ? the music is nothing less than captivating.
I Follow Rivers and Rich Kids Blues are witchy incantations, an impression furthered by Li's dancing, which conjures an image of a cannibal circling a bubbling cauldron. Later and even better, the girl-group harmonies of the wracked hate-song Get Some throb like a corrupted Shirelles number. In the midst of all the desolation is the cheery mini-hit Little Bit, a dance track that brings to mind fellow Swede Robyn. Li may be hurting, but she does it beautifully.
Shana Hiatt Tara Conner Drea de Matteo Trista Rehn Moon Bloodgood
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