Music review: Lykke Li - I Never Learn

Fans of Lykke Li will know better than to expect an album of upbeat ballads from the Swedish singer. On her debut, Youth Novels (2008), Li was revealed as a vulnerable soul, one whose songwriting seemed to be more a process of confession and catharsis than an attempt to entertain the masses. Its successor, Wounded Rhymes (2011), confirmed her status as a poster girl for pain.

I Never Learn is more of the same, an album that chronicles, in agonising detail, Li’s heartache after a break-up. It’s an exercise in self-indulgence, of course, but the tracks are so beautifully melodic, and Li’s delivery so haunting, you feel obliged to withhold judgment until you have heard all nine.

The album opens with the title track, on which, over a driving acoustic guitar, Li beats herself up over her inability to move on: “I live here like a starless lover/I die here like a phantom lover.” Thereafter, she recalls the highs and lows of a bad romance she clearly has no great wish to get out of her system.

Some of the tracks might belong better on a Katy Perry album: Never Gonna Love Again is simplistic in the extreme, with the kind of schoolgirl lyric her producers should have demanded she re-write (I mean, a couplet such as “every time the rain falls, think of me on a lonely highway” might be admirably Nordic, but it is hardly original). Heart of Steel is just as clichéd, while the acoustic Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone is more considered.

The best track is Gunshot, on which Li finally engages in the quiet/loud dynamic she could usefully have employed on so much of her material. The lyrics are also her most cutting: “I am longing for your poison/Like a cancer for its prey.”

Li concludes the album, if not her extended bout of introspection, with the bittersweet ballad Sleeping Alone. “Don’t want to get used to dancing alone,” she croons. “Someday somehow, somewhere down the line... we’ll meet again.”

The only relationship counselling Li needs is the old admonishment: get over it.