12 bucks for beer?! Are you nuts?

Yeah, that’s the first thing that hits you when you plunk your weary jet-lagged feet in Oslo. The rumors are true, this is one expensive city.

But music geeks are certainly getting plenty of bang for their buck, erm, krone, here at By:Larm, Norway’s annual showcase of the best in Scandinavian indie music. The fest got underway in earnest Thursday night, a ridiculous number of bands playing at 30 different venues, all within walking distance in central Oslo. It’s not as if the surprisingly energetic little city needed to get even nuttier at night, but folks have definitely taken to the fest, nearly selling it out, the sound of rumbling PA now lurking around every corner as bands try to win over the media and most importantly, the fans.

If there was one show everyone was looking at on Thursday, it was budding Swedish pop star Lykke Li at the trendy, cozy Blå club, just across the river from the equally hip Grunerløkken neighborhood. Her excellent debut album Youth Novel debuted strongly in Sweden, thanks to her two fabulous singles “Little Bit” and “I’m Good, I’m Gone”, and she proved to be even more charismatic than the record lets on, as she and her remarkably versatile backing band tore through an ebullient 45-minute set, the aforementioned tracks going over hugely with the crowd of 350, and even tossing a fun verse and chorus of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It”.The magnetic 21-year-old, who draws comparisons to Robyn but utilizes a much broader musical palette, is set to have a big year, and with a South By Southwest showcase on the near horizon, the buzz in North America is only going to get louder. [player]

Meanwhile, Norway’s Shining is starting to make waves among fans of metal, progressive rock, and post rock, the jazz-influenced 2007 album Grindstone one of last year’s buried treasures, and if Lykke Li was endearing, Shining was absolutely ferocious, their fusion of saxophone, clarinet, math metal, and Battles-style prog sounding transcendent in the confines of the immaculate sounding theater Sentrum Scene. The album was already impressive, but after witnessing it firsthand, this writer has a new favorite band. [player]

Biggest surprise of Thursday, though? Easily experimental quartet Alog med Sheriffs of Nothingness, who preceded Shining’s raucous set with a chilling blend of Kronos Quartet-style violins, bowed saw, laptop-triggered IDM, and the kind of tightly executed improvisation that warrants a comparison to Can. [player]