Ingmar Bergman's Dance Party

The last two months have been pretty good in the small live concert department: Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, St. Vincent, and, tonight, Jens Lekman. That's an impressive list of indie acts in such a short time period. Never mind that I still have The New Pornographers show next week and saw Wilco, Feist, and Spoon in the last three months of 2007. I'm being spoiled rotten after a long dry spell of live pop and rock and roll.

Opening for Lekman was a fellow Swede performing as The Honeydrips. I half wondered if this wasn't some kind of April Fool's Day gag as the guy placed a guitar over his shoulders and sang along to the prerecorded tracks on his Apple laptop. He did not, however, play the guitar. (The funniest part of his set was when he said he wouldn't be needing the instrument for the next song and took the guitar off.) His set was fine, but it seems beside the point to perform live if all of the music is on a hard drive.

Lekman took the stage with a Swedish bass player, drummer, and DJ and an American violinist and cellist. (The band is all-female, except for the DJ.) Everyone was dressed similarly in gray and wore keys on chains around their necks. Who knows why, but the minimalist effect transported them out of time (or out of the pages of an IKEA catalog). The same goes for the music, which is at once retro and modern. Lekman uses samples while he sings like an old crooner and his music recalls classic R&B and disco, among other styles.

While Lekman's brand of bittersweet Scandinavian pop has grooves, the impassive faces in the band as they moved rigidly to the music seemed like something parodying Swedish cinema or culture. They loosened up some by the end, but you know, the Germanic stiffness was endearing and *cough* familiar.

Lekman employs a generous amount of humor in the little scenes in his songs, in part to dampen the twee nature. It too has the deadpan quality that appeals a lot to me. He's a fine storyteller, as he demonstrates here in his commentary and lyrics to "A Postcard to Nina". He provided more background information about the song than he does in the linked performance clip, and it really helped flesh out one of the finest tracks on his album Night Falls Over Kortedala.

The concert was a fine way to unwind from two hectic days at the beginning of the academic quarter. Apropos of nothing other than it was posted today and I need something to help wrap this entry, check out Lekman's interview at The AV Club.