| Little Dragon/Machine Dreams |
| Written by Matthew Horton |
| Thursday, 27 August 2009 15:15 |
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 While the original scurries to debase his own myth, flooding the market with reams of sub-par releases and Sunday Mail giveaways, the quest is on to fill a Prince-sized hole in the rock landscape. TV On The Radio had a game punt with the taut funk, brassy tunes and general wild eclecticism of last year’s Dear Science triumph, and now here come their recent tour support. With their second album, Sweden's Little Dragon reckon they've made a record the purple priapus himself would be proud to call his own. It’s a lithe piece of 80s pop classicism, sure, but worthy of a genius? In truth, Little Dragon cherrypick rather than plunder the miniature maestro’s catalogue. Theirs is a spacious, often sedate sound, more reminiscent of Sign ‘O’ The Times, If I Was Your Girlfriend or When Doves Cry than fizzing epics like 1999. And altogether Machine Dreams is a set straight from 1985, not Paisley Park specifically. That said, they avoid pastiche. Where their self-titled 2007 debut dwelt on the heavy bass synths of early Human League and singer Yukimi Nagano’s arresting facility for sounding like Erykah Badu, Machine Dreams settles in its smoothly produced 80s niche yet never sounds dated. That gaudy decade is a rich hunting ground right now, but Little Dragon avoid the dauntingly layered sonics of Florence and the Machine and tinny keys of La Roux, wallowing instead in a sheen that seems genuinely futurist. Opening track A New still owes a debt to the Human League’s austere period, creating the eerie, bleak ambience Kanye West appeared to be striving for on 808s and Heartbreak – although, happily, Little Dragon trump Kanye by adding a tune. From this point, however, wings are spread and new, true colours are shown. Looking Glass with its splashy drums and marimba percussion is the obvious Prince touchstone, but the stabbed synths and detached vocals are more evocative of his cohorts Wendy and Lisa. My Step boasts a beautifully abrupt chord change into a pulsating chorus – “My step slide/Lightning fight/Tropical times”. Beguiling nonsense; it could almost come from the pen of another 80s icon – er, Simon Le Bon. The swinging, crystalline chimes of Never Never hit like piercing shards of sunlight, its bittersweet refrain “I could never have what you have” nailing the flavour of the album. Regret also soaks the drifting Thunder Love, Nagano sighing, “Keep dreaming of when I was kissing you/My past erase as we lay in a daze”. Lyrics deal in the abstract, but there’s no escaping the sense of melancholy. Well-chosen singles are where the album really hits its stride: Feather is softly atmospheric – “You are airborne/You got silver rays/Will it ever float/Will it ever soar along?” – bubbling along on a charming synth signature courtesy of keyboard player Håkan Wirenstrand; the intriguingly titled Blinking Pigs is a bouncing earworm wriggling free of plangent chords straight out of the songbook of devastatingly earnest mid-80s jazz-poppers China Crisis. Somehow that’s a good thing. This is a record steeped in an oddly comforting disquiet, subdued yet hopeful. Living up to its name, Machine Dreams finds the organic in the mechanical. It has soul in its neat grooves and while Little Dragon don’t crackle with the new like the fierce modernism of – to take another Swedish treasure - Fever Ray, this is an album that sounds as contemporary as anything in hock to styles of 25 years ago can. That it can do this and still remember to rack up the killer tunes, well, that’s the cherry on the cake. TV On The Radio
Prince
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