Track Listing

1. Melodies & Desires
2. Dance, Dance, Dance
3. I'm Good, I'm Gone
4. Let It Fall
5. My Love
6. Tonight
7. Little Bit
8. Hanging High
9. This Trumpet In My Head
10. Complaint Department
11. Breaking It Up
12. Everybody But Me
13. Time Flies
14. Window Blues

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4224 in Music
• Released on: 2008-06-09
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk review
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

CD Description
'Youth Novels' is the debut album from Swedish singer songwriter Lykke Li. Produced and recorded by Peter, Bjorn And John's Bjorn Yttling, the album's mix of simple electro and quirky indie pop sits perfectly below Li's breathy, pixie-likevocals and has seen her compared to Iceland's biggest export, Bjork. The singles 'Breaking It Up' and 'Little Bit' are included.

About the Artist
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.

Customer Reviews

Good Swedish Indie Pop
Swedish indie pop artist Lykke Li Zachrisson , better known to us as just plain old Lykke Li, has now recorded a full length album as a follow up to her debut three track EP, Little Bit, which was released last year. Like the earlier release this is on her own LL label and was produced by Bjorn Yttling (of Peter, Bjorn & John) who also co-wrote these tracks with her. This album, Youth Novels, was recorded in New York.

Some people may also remember Lykke Li from the songs she made for her MySpace profile a few years ago; ethereal, but sensual, vocals against a slightly bass heavy sound, again courtesy of Bjorn. These songs proved very popular in Sweden and also around the world by those who were lucky enough to discover them.

This current set has 14 tracks and runs for a little over 50 minutes, it flows well as an album and Bjorn's production work holds the whole thing together well. There are echoes of Goldfrapp here and there, and a hint of Kate Nash in some of Lykke's vocals, but otherwise the album has it's own distinctive and varied feel. A couple of tracks are strong enough to be successful singles, and a slightly edited version of "Tonight" could well be a big summer hit - great hook - if it gets the exposure.

For me, however, Lykke's voice, although very good, isn't great and by the end of the album started to sound slightly unexciting. It's interesting enough for a few tracks, and distinctive enough to be easily recognisable on the radio, useful for the singles market. It can sometimes be difficult for European acts to get exposure to the UK market, and how much promotion this album gets could determine it's success or failure here. I'm sure this album will do very well in her native Sweden however, and will prove to be very popular with her international fan base who I'm sure have been eagerly awaiting this release for months.

An experimental album full of promise.
This album is full of vibrant tracks which can easily be listened to and appreciated for the artistic beauty they convey. The haunting voice blends well with the muted tones of harpsichords, flutes, and theremins. I would not normally purchase such an album but I am pleasantly surprised by how pleasant this was to listen to.

I will certainly be awaiting the next album from the quite obviously talented Lykke Li.

Love is a symphony
For the record, Lykke Li has one of the most punnish stage names in all of the pop world.

Fortunately the obvious jokes are no reflection on the talents of this fledgling Swedish singer (real name: Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson), her high soft voice, and her unique brand of pop music. And her full-length debut "Youth Novels" is an exquisite little confection -- wistful, robustly elfin songs set to sweetly wintry electro-folkpop.

It opens with a gentle stream of piano and plaintive strings, as Lykke Li quietly speaks. "Follow these instructions/Do exactly as I do... Love is the harmony/Desire is the key/Love is a symphony/Now play it with me..."

Things pick up with the more "Dance Dance Dance," an adorable little song about expressing your feelings via dancing, and the hard-edged/twinkly piano of "I'm Good I'm Gone" ("Well, say you're not 'cause when I'm gone/You'll be callin' but I won't be at the phone!"). But things start relaxing with the jazzier pop melody of "Let It Fall."

From there, Lykke Li explores some more mellow electro-folkpop, with haunting folk songs tinged with synth, sweetly romantic (and slightly sexy) guitar pop, exquisitely wistful ballads, dark electropop, and a weird experimental number where she spends a long time muttering "can't get that trumpet outta my head!" The album ends on a rather dark note with the stomping ballad "Window Blues ("Don't go all soft on me/don't come across for me/don't lose your selfish ways over me...."

If I had to compare Lykke Li to somebody, I'd say she sounds like Stina Nordenstam, or a more childlike, less innocent El Perro Del Mar. But those are just stylistic similarities, because her pretty pop has a very distinct sound even in her first album. And "Youth Novels" has a feeling of bittersweet, pretty intimacy -- it's sitting with a friend whose heart has just started to heal, and watching the snowflakes flutter down outside the window.

And her music is also very pretty -- we've got a bit of jazz, a bit of indie pop, and a veil of pale, soft electronica laid over it all like a blanket. She even does some experimentation in such songs as "Dance Dance Dance," which is the most mellow, downtempo dance song I've ever heard -- and most of it is just drums and a tapped bell.

The rest of the time, you can hear a delicate web of solid instrumentation -- half-smothered saxophone, a folky acoustic guitar, a xylophone, gentle tinkly piano melodies, kettle drums, and stretches of gentle plaintive strings. Oh yes, and some moments of buzzy dark synthpop, like in the gloriously dark "Complaint Department," and a swirling Spanish guitar that winds through one song.

And then there's the vocals. This girl has a voice of spun glass and sunlit icicles, and regardless of what she sings she sounds incredibly sweet and fragile. Despite some awkward moments ("For you I keep my legs apart" -- what?), her lyrics are also quite sweet -- the absence of love is painful, while its presence brings you shyness, joy and defensiveness. Just look at the one about communicating love through dance.

If you just skimmed through "Youth Novel," you'd think that Lykke Li's debut album was just a stretch of electropop with some folk overtones. But it's something far prettier and more alluring.