Little Dragon / Billygoat January 8, 2011

Little Dragon’s palette is broad enough to lend the album a rich, luscious sound, but specific enough to ground the work in a particular time and place, though the definition of both terms is left to the listener’s imagination. Some of the songs, like “Looking Glass” and “My Step”, sound like a 1980s version of the future, and owe a debt to the keyboard aesthetics of freestyle and Prince circa Sign ‘O’ the Times. Others, like the gorgeous ballad “Feather” and the claustrophobic “Thunder Love”, bring to mind the dystopian sexiness of Tricky’s early classics on Maxinquaye and Pre-Millennium Tension. Yukimi Nagano, the band’s charismatic Swedish-Japanese vocalist, has a smokey yet agile voice, and it serves as the anchor of each song. She avoids melisma, but her phrasing is in the general wheelhouse of modern R&B, particularly British iterations of the genre. As with every other element of their sound, Nagano’s voice places Little Dragon’s music in a lineage of recognizable influences under a vague “urban” umbrella, but it all comes out just a bit off, which is to say, unexpected and original.

Official Website: http://www.attheecho.com/2010/11/09/saturday-01-08-11-little-dragon-echoplex/