FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes
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THERE are two reasons…
for including Lykke Li in this Vinyl Corner. Not only is it her birthday on 18th March; her amazing second studio album, Wounded Rhymes, is one that people should get. I am going to point people in the way of the Anniversary Edition which came out last year. If supply is short, you can buy the album here. This is what the Anniversary Edition offers:
“LA-based, vocalist, producer, and songwriter Lykke Li releases the 10th Anniversary Deluxe Reissue of her seminal album Wounded Rhymes. The critically acclaimed album was produced by Bjorn Yttling and named one of the Best Albums of 2011 by The New York Times, Pitchfork, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, Clash, Paste, SPIN, and more. The album yielded singles I Follow Rivers, Get Some, Sadness is a Blessing, and Youth Knows No Pain. The first LP features the original album, along with a bonus LP featuring unreleased demo versions of Youth Knows No Pain, Jerome, I Follow Rivers and remixes by The Magician and Tyler, The Creator. The vinyl release features the original artwork on the sleeve, plus an o card wrapping the release with the brand new anniversary artwork.
Track-listing
Disc 1
Side A
1 - Youth Knows No Pain
2 - I Follow Rivers
3 - Love out of Lust
4 - Unrequited Love
5 - Get Some
Side B
1 - Rich Kids Blues
2 - Sadness Is A Blessing
3 - I Know Places
4 - Jerome
5 - Silent My Song
Disc 2
Side A
1 - Youth Knows No Pain (The Lost Sessions)
2 - Jerome (The Lost Sessions)
3 - I Follow Rivers (The Lost Sessions)
Side B
1 - I Follow Rivers (The Magician Remix)
2 - I Follow Rivers (Tyler, The Creator Remix)”.
A remarkable follow-up to her 2008 debut, Youth Novels, the Swedish musician created something of a masterpiece with her second album. Lykke Li spoke with The Guardian in 2011 and she talked about the sound and direction of Wounded Rhymes:
“No, it's easy to make a dark album," she laughs. "I love pouring my heart out. People don't want to hear you whine when you're with friends, so you can sing about it instead – it's the best outlet."
The first album was also preoccupied by painful love affairs, though sweetened by cute-sounding hits such as "Little Bit". At the time, she talked about a "really weird relationship" that had been torturing her for years. Is it the same heartbreak haunting her on this album?
She furrows her brow. "The problem is, when I talk about heartbreak or whatever, people want to melt it down to some break-up of a relationship, but it's not about that. If you're a sensitive person, just stepping outside can be heartbreaking."
All this makes Wounded Rhymes sound like a decidedly gloomy prospect, but actually it's a captivating album full of beautiful moments despite – or perhaps because of – Li's unconventional voice, which was childlike on Youth Novels but has become harder and huskier. ("I think I sing like shit," she tells me at one point, though her numerous fans might disagree.) And it's not all melancholy. "Youth Knows No Pain" and "Get Some" are rousing songs with big crashing drums and punchy choruses.
"Like a shotgun/ Needs an outcome/ I'm your prostitute/ You gon' get some," she drawls on the latter track. It sounds very much like a threat, but some have interpreted the line in a less complicated way. What did she mean by it?
"It's my comment on how men, and especially journalists, look on women and write articles about female artists," she says, fixing me with a flinty stare.
I tug at my collar uneasily. Could she explain further?
"How much can you explain? If that's what you think, if that's your opinion, then I'm your prostitute, you're gonna get some. It's not about sex, or being a victim, it's actually really powerful, you know. It's kind of like Scarface or something: 'You want some of this, I'm going to get you some of this.'
"I just want to be free," she goes on. "Men can be whatever they want to be. Like David Bowie. He can have no shirt or go dressed as a woman. Why can't I do that?”.
Before I end this feature, I want to bring together a couple of effusive reviews for an album that ranked alongside the best albums of 2011. Many publications and sites placed Wounded Rhymes in their top twenty of the year. A top forty album in the U.S. and U.K., it contains the stunning song, I Follow Rivers. This is what The A.V. Club had to say about Wounded Rhymes:
“When Sweden’s Lykke Li first appeared, she seemed like an indie-pop dream—slight of stature, big on heart. Adorable, energetic, and just artsy enough, she was effortlessly able to weave radio buoyancy through a comely web of electro, folk, and rock. Bloggers and critic types were sure they’d discovered their chart-conquering heroine, and then… she disappeared. Wounded Rhymes is the overdue follow-up to Li’s 2008 debut, Youth Novels, (recorded while she was 19; she’s now 24) and it might as well belong to someone else entirely. That Lykke Li was looking for love. This one found it, then sent it back after discovering it was a bad fit. “Sadness is my boyfriend,” she sings on “Sadness Is A Blessing,” a song that owes its big drums, dramatic piano hits, and copious reverb to The Shangri-Las, or perhaps Björn Yttling’s take on the Phil Spector sound. It seems impossible that the girl who sung “Little Bit” would become the woman of “Unrequited Love,” a spare country ballad which concludes that her heartache “must mean I live again / And get back what I gave my men / Get back what I lost to them.” The fact that this is followed by the darkly bouncy single “Get Some,” in which she casts herself as a prostitute employing “pussy power” (her words, via Pitchfork), only widens the gulf between then and now. At its core, this is an album about innocence lost—the opener, “Youth Knows No Pain,” is hardly celebratory; it’s a message to her old self, essentially saying, “You have no idea”—set to a cavernous, damaged pop score. At her core, this new snarling, burned Lykke Li is unfamiliar, perhaps even to herself, but it’s to our benefit. We get to meet her all over again”.
Pitchfork had some interesting observations about Wounded Rhymes. Even though it is over ten years old, I listen back to the album now and it keeps revealing new things. Certain songs have grown in stature and meaning all of these years later! This is part of Pitchfork’s review:
“Like Joss Whedon's show, Wounded Rhymes is an album of stark, scintillating contrasts: between fantasy and reality, between the powerful and the vulnerable, between the brash and the quiet, between the rhythmic and the melodic. Audacious anthems jostle next to heartbreak ballads like "Unrequited Love", with its simple guitar and shoo-wop backing vocals. Dense, busy numbers give way to emotionally and musically stripped tracks like "I Know Places". "I'm your prostitute, you gon' get some," she sings on "Get Some", a come-on so blunt that it's become the talking point for this album. As a single, the song brazenly grabs your attention, but in the context of this album, alongside such forlorn songs, it becomes a desperate statement, disarmingly intimate in its role-playing implications but also uncomfortably eager to shed or adopt new identities to ensure a lover's devotion.
Rather than adjust or reconcile them, Li lets all those contradictions ride, having grown more comfortable in her musical skin. While there are no highs here quite as high as Youth Novels' "Little Bit" or "Breaking It Up" (and no low nearly as low as "Complaint Department", though "Rich Kids" comes pretty damn close), there is a sense of cohesion missing from that debut, as well as an understanding that a record can be a document of a particularly tumultuous time and place. To write these songs, Li spent long months in New York and Southern California, spending a great deal of time alone in the desert. The result is depressive without being depressing, dark without being bleak, as it rejuvenates, refines, and redirects her eccentricities.
The biggest moments on Wounded Rhymes take the form of slower ballads, whether stripped down like "I Know Places" or grandiose like "Sadness Is a Blessing". But they gain their power in contrast to the more upbeat tracks like opener "Youth Knows No Pain". Dropping some of the coy affectations of Youth Novels, Li proves a surprisingly dramatic singer with a powerful voice and strong phrasing, able to render the emotional pain of "Sadness Is a Blessing" as somehow exultant-- a transcendent state of being.
Like any good vocalist, she knows when to bow out and let the music speak for her. "I Know Places" cuts off early to set up a long, dreamy coda that acts as both a quiet promise of escape and an album intermission that sets up the penultimate "Jerome", which seems to synthesize every single emotional and musical urge on the album. Both ballad and banger, the song sheds its elements until only the thunderous heartbeat rhythm remains. That moment bleeds into the finale, "Silent My Song", a nearly a cappella closer that swells and fades dramatically. "No fist needed when you call," Li sings. "You silent my song." It's a devastating statement, yet ultimately an untrustworthy one: She has harnessed her heartache and her happiness to amplify her voice, not to lose it”.
Go and see if you can go and get a copy of Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes. It is a beautiful album that people should hear. Although a lot of the sounds and lyrics are quire dark at times, there is a lot of different emotions and textures throughout. Lykke Li’s voice is at its very best throughout the album. Ensure that you put Wounded Rhymes…
IN your collection.