Fpurl

That's what opener Anna Ternheim dubbed the Ternheim-Li-del Mar lineup at the Triple Door last night, the "Swedish girls tour." She was the solo singer/songwriter of the night, with a throaty, room-filling voice, a setlist stuffed with love and anti-love songs, and a guitar. (She also took over the grand piano.) "That one was about a girl who's a stalker," she mentioned off-handedly. "Any stalkers here tonight?" Her songs often ended surprisingly, in mid-flow. Twice she accompanied her iPod; a cover tune turned out to be Fleetwood Mac's "Little Lies," slowed to dirge-speed.

All the cocky, wry "Little Bit" by Lykke Li needs to overrun the U.S. iPod population is the kind of break that the Cardigan's "Lovefool" got--a spot on a hip soundtrack. Li has the benefit of an extra helping of cute and an idiosyncratic voice: breathy baby-girl ("Little bit in love wi' you," she sings, and your heart melts) mixed with Swedish soul. Her first full album is Youth Novels. Live, she's in perpetual motion, sashaying around the stage, swiveling her hips, one hand pushing the audience back, the other punishing a cymbal with a drumstick. Her sound veers in time, sometimes girl-group (Sarah Assbring came out for back-up duty), sometimes Euro disco. The last two songs she let the audience choose: "The thing is I don't know what to do," she said. "I thought I'd get a vibe from the crowd, but you're sitting down out there and I can't tell. Ballad or blues?" We went with ballad.

El Perro del Mar's Sarah Assbring was clad all in black, singing songs that reverberate from deep inside a cavern of loneliness. We picture late-20s women all over Capitol Hill returning home from Trader Joe's with the red wine and the spring mix salad bad, and From the Valley to the Stars on repeat. She says it's a spiritual album--her set diverged from Lykke Li's sex kitten's happy/sad waltz in that--but like most people, her spiritual quest arrives from things not going the way they ought. Often she fingers talismanic phrases like beads for an entire song, giving each repetition a slightly different pass. ("Inner Island" is pure mantra: "Don't cast away your inner island" x15.) "Glory to the World" or "God Knows (You Gotta Give to Get)" are upbeat in their way, and there's more girl-group ooh-ing and ah-ing, but watching her felt like an outtake from a David Lynch movie with a dazed Laura Dern-esque lead singer trying to keep it together. Which, don't get us wrong, is fabulous. Her encore with with Lykke Li, "After Laughter (Come Tears)," underlined the whole set's severe, clear-eyed view of coming up short.