"Tonight feels special," Jens Lekman said archly to the audience upon taking the stage. From the beginning, Lekman and his five-person backing band exuded the charm that audiences have come to expect. Even Lekman's most poignant tracks off recent albums Night Falls Over Kortedala (2007) and Oh You're So Silent Jens (2005) contain an element of the Swedish singer's sweet, almost twee sense of humor. The all-female band (save the world's skinniest laptop technician, who was a man) and the coordinated stage dress (all on stage wore silver antique keys around their necks, along with white shoes and simple indie-style clothes in shades of grey, light blue, tan and white) was thus an appropriate group to bring Lekman's songs to life Friday at the Paradise Rock Club.Lekman began the show with the song "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You," off Kortedala. His voice sounded strong, like on the album, and he and the group provided visual interest with their clear excitement for performing. Many of the songs he played throughout the set merged into each other medley-style, adding to the energy streaming through the crowd.

The dance-party feeling continued when, halfway through "The Opposite of Hallelujah," Lekman's skeletal laptoppist sampled The Chairmen of the Board's 1970 hit "Give Me Just a Little More Time" as Lekman and the other musicians broken into a seemingly spontaneous and random but actually choreographed dance on stage, only to return to their posts seconds later to finish "Hallelujah." It's often disappointing when bands have to rely on prerecorded sounds (in Lekman's case, for xylophone and harpsichord passages), but Lekman et al made up for the weakness with Scandinavian charm and long but very entertaining stories about the sources of the songs. Topics of on-stage discussion ranged from Lekman's move to the "worst apartment in Gothenburg" (When the landlord told him that it was the worst apartment, and Jens asked why, the landlord said that the previous tenant had drowned in the bathtub and remained there for three months before his body was discovered) and the American customs officers' use of Wikipedia to check his credentials ("I like that the American authorities use Wikipedia as a reliable source").

The discussion of Wikipedia came about during the encore, which lasted almost 30 minutes. (Said Jens, "The night is young. I just want to keep playing songs.") Lekman played the six or seven songs of the encore with little to no accompaniment, at one point singing to a karimba, often referred to as the African thumb piano. During the encore Lekman played what I thought was the highlight of the evening: "Shirin," a song from Kortedala about his hairdresser who ran a salon out of her apartment across the street from his. I'll confess; I hadn't listened to all of Kortedala before coming to the show, and "Shirin" was a new song to me.

A nearly a cappella version of "Pocket Full of Money" off Oh You're So Silent Jens also wowed the audience, who kept Lekman onstage after each song of the encore with requests for more. Lekman engaged the audience to sing the chorus of "Pocket Full of Money" as well as fill in the saxophone parts by whistling.

Though the Paradise's rather unpleasant layout (three columns in the middle of the main audience area and the bar in the middle of the traffic jam at the entrance) and location (west of Boston University, at the Pleasant Street stop on the Green Line B) make going to shows there less exciting than the Middle East or the now-bulldozed Avalon, the club consistently gets such acts as Jens Lekman that the Boston concertgoing public must drag themselves down Commonwealth Avenue to see them on a regular basis. Fortunately, this time Lekman and friends charmed the audience into oblivion as they hopped around the stage and offered up the energetic, sweet pop Jens is known for.