Lykke Li will light up the night at Central Park SummerStage benefit on August 1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Rumsey Playfield, Central Park
Monday, August 1, $30-$35, 6:30
212-360-2777
www.summerstage.org
www.myspace.com/lykkeli
We caught Swedish sensation Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson lighting up Webster Hall back in May, returning to New York City to celebrate the release of her long-awaited second album, Wounded Rhymes. An intoxicating blend of Stevie Nicks and Sinead O’Connor, the twenty-five-year-old Li and her band were all dressed in black, Li in a shawl covering a bodysuit, her hair tightly pulled back like one of Robert Palmer’s backup singers. On a stage with long black strips of filmy cloth hanging from the ceiling, smoke machines pouring out cloudy mists, and lights continually flashing, Li put on a dazzling seventy-five-minute set that included songs from Rhymes, 2008’s Youth Novels, and such singles as “Possibility,” from the New Moon soundtrack, music steeped in synthesizers and percussion. She played autoharp on the lovely “I Know Places” and added her own percussion to “Rich Kid Blues.” Although far from a melancholic evening, many of her songs deal with loneliness and heartbreak; “Sadness is a blessing / Sadness is a pearl / Sadness is my boyfriend / Oh, sadness, I’m your girl,” she opines on “Sadness Is a Blessing,” and in “Unrequited Love” she wails, “Oh my love, I’ve been denied it / Oh my love is unrequited.” But long before she tore into the set-closing “Get Some,” from the new record, she had the crowd wrapped around her finger like a lonely lover’s charm. Li is back in town on Monday night, August 1, playing a sold-out benefit show at SummerStage, with Montreal trio Timbre Timbre, touring behind its latest release, Creep on Creepin’ On.