Lykke Li - I Never Learn

Lykke Li
I Never Learn
2 May 2014
LL

4 stars out of 5

 

I feel bad for Sweden. So much great music has been exported from this country with a population only two-thirds that of Istanbul, and pretty much all of it has been in English. Where are the great internationally-known acts who sing only in Swedish? Lykke Li hails from Skåne, a part of Sweden where a dialect is spoken which other Swedes have so much difficulty understanding that it’s often considered a different language altogether. For these poor souls, for whom even Swedish could be seen as the language of a foreign power, English is a second layer of cultural colonization on top.

Lykke Li’s third LP, I Never Learn, is her least experimental and most obviously pop record to date. This doesn’t mean she’s going to be rubbing shoulders with Lady Gaga anytime soon—she’s still far too intense and challenging for that—but present here are several massive radio-friendly hooks that should see Lykke Li’s music playing in homes and businesses who had no idea of her existence before now.

Witness the sing-along ballads “Never Gonna Love Again” and “Heart of Steel,” two tracks that go all-out in their gospel-meets-‘80s pop bombast. Ystad’s favourite chanteuse seems to be reaching for an audience beyond the hipster kids and the swedophiles. For her old fans there’s “No Rest for the Wicked” and “Gunshot,” a pair of dark and edgy tunes that rescue the album from a less happy fate. They are the context by which we can orient ourselves to the ballads; they are the dark matter that holds the universe together. The ballads are very good, and perhaps she is one of today’s finest masters of the form, but all ballads and no play makes Lykke Li a dull artist.

Once all the numbers have been crunched, all the totals tallied, I Never Learn is a third straight victory for Lykke Li. She’s not the same innocent-sounding girl who made Youth Novels, nor is she attempting to retrace old paths. It’s a confident record by a talented artist, one who found her own voice long ago but who isn’t afraid to keep exploring it.

reviewed by Richard Krueger