Jens Lekman The Impossible Shapes

“Hello people of Boston and Somerville,” said Jens Lekman, standing atop his amp in an emptied-out restaurant conjoined to a sports bar.

Pale, boyish features and dark, matted hair, he seems an odd choice for a bona fide pop star, but he is… in Sweden. As Lekman stared across the packed room on this, his first full US tour, his awkward stance suggested a cognizance of his own unlikelihood. He appeared as he did on the cover to last year’s magnificent debut When I Said I Wanted to be Your Dog, wide-eyed and uncomfortable, confused by his own success, having never wished to pay more than mere homage to heroes like Beat Happening, the Magnetic Fields, and the Divine Comedy.

Even before he played a note, his presence seemed unnecessarily crude, even impromptu. Here was artist—a chart-topper in his own country—nervously standing on an amplifier before a mere few hundred people, leaving many wondering whether he would lose his balance and stumble from the stage or simply freeze on the spot.

But as he leaned toward his mic, the self-assuredness that so characterizes the deep, crooning inflections of his debut album quickly trumped his meager appearance. With a snap of his fingers and a light guitar strum, Lekman slowly intoned, “If you ever need a stranger/ to sing at your wedding/ a last minute choice/ then I am your man,” standing an amp’s height above the hushed crowd. Having dropped his accent (as though possessed by the specter of Sinatra), he continued, “I know every song, you name it/ by Bacharach or David.” He then stopped playing, surveyed his audience a second time, and coyly deadpanned, “actually, I only know two songs by Bacharach or David.”

A guilty smile surfaced as the crowd - both amused at the aside and confused at a break in atmosphere so early in the show—convulsed in laughter. Then he continued playing as though never having stopped in the first place.

This opening number in Lekman’s set, “If You Ever Need a Stranger” was not the first of his compositions performed that evening. Local opener Pants Yell offered a brief invocation of the same type of slacker rock championed in Lekman’s work while also paying him a direct, though confounding, homage—a cover of Lekman’s “Tram #7 to Heaven”. And it worked, for the most part; it was just a shame the song’s writer could no longer, in good conscience, perform it himself.

Lekman’s Secretly Canadian label mates The Impossible Shapes followed Pants Yell, bringing their neo-psychedelia to Pa’s humble stage. Of the evening’s three acts, the Shapes seemed the most temporally displaced, their hippy-spazzed songcraft recalling everything from Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd to the Elephant 6 collective’s cutest, most deliberately endearing moments.

“Bombs” thrived on repetition as its light guitar weave spiraled around frontman Chris Barth’s vocals, bandmates Aaron Deer, Jason Groth, and Mark Rice gradually layered crashing percussion, dizzying tremolo stabs and one jarring, circular guitar solo into a tumult of frenetic distortion.

But the night belonged to Jens Lekman. Playing several somber numbers from his debut but largely relying on an upbeat and eclectic array of EP selections, the set followed through on the abandonment of pretense so aptly fingered by Lekman’s quip during “If You Ever Need a Stranger (to Sing at Your Wedding)”. Even in the aptly titled “Psychogirl”, he lamented, “If I’d be your psychologist, who would be the psychologist’s psychologist?”

Flanked by a full band, Lekman’s best moments were his least restrained. “A Sweet Summer’s Night on Hammer Hill” seemed to combine the baroque eccentricities of Harry Nilsson with the tongue-in-cheek melancholia of Stephin Merritt. Some whimsical fiddle-work proved a surprisingly effective replacement for the dusty, muted trumpet of the recorded version—found on Lekman’s recent Julie EP. But the song’s call-and-response chorus (“bumpa bumpa bumpa bum bump!”) and the band’s emphatic participation recalled some backyard hillbilly jug band, not an unlikely quintet of Europeans playing a sports bar outside of Cambridge, and certainly not a group of Sweden’s finest stars.