New Lykke Li Single: “Get Some”

You and me; we’ve been waiting for this.  A brand new single from  Sweden’s Lykke Li complete with B-side is available now from her WEBSITE for the price of an email and your year of birth.  “Get Some” and it’s fuzzy twin “Paris Blue”, are two giant clues to what we’ll be getting from her yet unnamed 2nd effort, which we DO know will be out: “sometime early next year”.  And if we take those clues and pull/eek/stretch them out into tiny little specs of forthcomingness, you might think that she’s done being that shy girl with her eyes peeking just above the sheets. 

Speaking of her Youth Novels:

“I wrote it when I was suffering from heartbreak,” she says. “At least I got a song out of it. Melancholy is definitely a state I often find myself in. Sometimes I slide out of it, but I always seem to come back. My mom thinks I was born that way.”

But NOW……, now she has seemingly fought her way out of that state, unleashing a doppelganger that will lock and keep your eyes when you meet hers.  Stomping snare and warbling guitar phrase the line “I am your prostitute”  in a bolder hands-on-hips fashion.  Personally, it doesn’t ring true.  The best qualities of Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson’s voice are all the nicks and bruises that ooze so easily through.  Strength just isn’t IN her lungs anywhere, and here…, she seems like she’s forcing it up and out.  Lines like; “Just like a man, I’m the fortress” sound empty, and the more voices she adds behind it, the more Li looses her feminine grace she was so fantastic in. 

Yet this could all be exactly what she’s planned.  She WANTS to run far from her other, softer self, bringing all the new characters with her, but none of the old.  We’ve seen her sway with bullhorns, and perhaps her newest record will be a live chorus of gut punches, and then…then maybe we’ll get it.  Listen to the title track the companion B-side, and see what you think.

Lykke Li – Get Some & Paris Blue by underthunder

The below restores faith.

[Lykke Li Myspace]

(The Get Some EP is available from Rough Trade Records on vinyl soon)

-Matt