Lykke Li - Eyeye
by Zena Grieg
published: 21 / 6 / 2022
Label:
Play It Again Sam
Format: CD
intro
Intimate and minimalist yet cinematic fifth album from Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li
Now California-based, the Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li has released a surprisingly intimate new album. Eschewing digital instruments and enhancements, the Swedish romantic instead has focused on a minimalist production, using only a $70 drum microphone for all vocals. Created with long-time collaborator Bjorn Yttling, this fifth album, described by Li as more of an audio-visual project than a traditional record, is accompanied by analogue videos which startle with their primary colours, neon lights, claustrophobic settings and hypnotic, surreal repetition. On the concept behind the album, Li said: “I was really interested in taking a grand form like moviemaking and cutting it all up, as that’s where we are right now. I was thinking about Marina Abramovic’s ‘Relation in Space,’ where she’s continuously running into a man, or Pina Bausch, when she’s falling down over and over again. There was something in the repetition that felt so true to me, almost like a perfect action – a kind of slicing into the truth.” Highlights of this stripped-back eight-track collection include: the lead single, plaintive opener ‘No Hotel’ with its lingering, longing harmonies; the painful intensity of ‘You Don’t Go Away’ with its breathless, exhausted vocals; the mournful, synth-pop-tinged ‘Highway To Your Heart’ with its sparse lyrics: “Night falls, and it, it rains, and I wake up alone/Get high, but it won’t last, I’m still alone”; the funereal ‘Happy Hurts’; the playful, carnivalesque ‘Carousel’ with its caught-in-a loop memories: “Spin my heart around and ‘round/Flying and I can’t come down/Yeah, I’m as high as hell/And I can’t let go”; and the defiantly optimistic closer ’U and I’, where Li refuses to have the door closed on a relationship: “Turn around, yeah you/The movie is you and I”. Oscillating between mournfulness and meditation, ‘Eyeye’ is an ethereal, cinematic exploration of heartache and breakup and the thin veneer between reality and dreams.
Track Listing:-
Band Links:-
https://www.lykkeli.com/https://www.facebook.com/lykkeli
https://twitter.com/lykkeli
Label Links:-
https://twitter.com/piasrecordingshttps://www.facebook.com/playitweb
http://www.playitagainsam.net/
https://www.youtube.com/user/playitweb
Play in YouTube:-
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