On her Irish debut, the Sugar Club is stuffed to capacity – leaving late-comers straining for glimpses of the diminutive singer from the back of the room. She’s worth stretching your neck for – though tagged as a blog-approved alterna.pixie, the Stockholm native is in fact a pop maven of the old school; like fellow Nordic wunder-women Annie and Knife’s Karin Andersson, she leavens her quirkiness with dollops of grooviness and starburst melodies.
Or so her first album, Youth Novels, suggests. Tonight, though, she starts tentatively, meandering through a succession of minimalist ballads that offer hints of sparkle but are mostly focused on channeling bedsit moochiness. As the audience sways softly from side to side, a nagging question presents itself: have we stumbled upon an indie wallflower love-in?
But just as you’re starting to question whether the buzz on Li is misplaced, she cranks it up. Lurching beats and twinkling guitars are conjured by her four-piece band and she plunges into ‘I’m Good, I’m Gone’, the Bjork-goes-disco heatseeker that deserves to become her anthem. From here, it’s a short stylistic journey to ‘Let It Fall’, a laptop rap that cadges the riff from ‘Under Pressure’ and the sensibility of a lo-fi Tori Amos, leaving us helplessly smitten.
Li is, by all accounts, deeply wary of her burgeoning indie-pop celebrity. When Swedish hipsters started aping her mad-woman beehive, she vowed to never wear her hair in such a fashion again. To judge by this evening’s rapturous welcome, she’s going to have to try a great deal harder than that to throw us off the scent.