A slight sensation of panic swept over me as I went online Monday afternoon to get a ticket for my friend joining me at the Little Dragon show at Doug Fir that night. I had just spent three days in which nearly every single person I encountered had babbled on about how excited they were for said show, and it left me rethinking how unknown I had felt this Swedish quartet to be.
I had discovered them via an avid bunch of music-lovin' friends and felt, to be honest, like Little Dragon would remain ours and only ours, a band only true fans would know and love. But as this show crept closer, I began to see I was terribly wrong, and that anyone with a good ear respected the ground the band seemed to float on. This put a decent-sized kink in my plan to casually sashay up to the Doug Fir and get an extra ticket at the last minute.
My fears were confirmed when my online purchase request was denied. Sold out? Already?! Calls to the venue reassured me we could snag one of the few tickets released when the doors opened, but the process of getting my hands on that ticket was an agonizingly victorious one. It left me analyzing all that is to love about this band, and how they’ve established themselves as such favorites. Truly, they've defined the idea of electronic soul with so much skill and precision that no argument can really be made against what they do. Little Dragon polishes their work with colossal beauty, using a smoothly disjointed menu of beats and mesmerizing vocals by songstress Yukimi Nagano.
It's often not the electronics that get the most attention, but rather, Nagano's enchanting voice. In Little Dragon's two released albums, Nagano summons up immediate comparisons to Erykah Badu, and it's this that cements the band's stature as a neo soul group. Their appeal grabbed the ears of Gorillaz, who featured the band on tracks "To Binge" and "Empire Rats" off their 2010 release, Plastic Beach, and included Little Dragon on last year's tour to support the album. Amidst all that impressive reputation building, Little Dragon found their way to Portland twice last year, yet I managed to miss them both times. Their wintry return was one I refused to let slip me by.
Joining Little Dragon on their U.S. tour was Billygoat, a trio of musical craftsmen who got their start as Nick Woolley and David Klein worked with woodworking and animation together in Los Angeles. After transplanting to Portland, music (and an additional musician) became a piece of their artwork as they chose to perform live scores to the stop motion animation films they were developing. The end result was breathtakingly received by everyone at Doug Fir this night. It was a performance piece gone theatrical, with the imagery cast upon the screen behind the band melding perfectly with every beat and break and vibration Billygoat emitted from their instruments. It was a sensory sensation that copied the grooves of an open jam and featured graphics that seemed to have been plucked directly from nature.
Rarely were mics used throughout the set, as the instrumentation established itself as the only thing that really needed to be happening alongside the art projection. Employing a harpsichord, guitar, keyboard, drums and other instruments, the band would frequently change the speed and style of their sound, often from whimsical to melancholy bar blues. As overused as the word epic is these days, it's one that easily applies to the masterpiece Billygoat created onstage.
Little Dragon were not to be forgotten, however, and the execution of their set was timeless, beautiful, and completely appreciated by the oversized crowd. Nagano seemed to grab everyone by their throats and transfix them with her commanding, raw delivery. Her vocals seemed toned down from what I knew off the band's recordings, but this didn't detract from what she was able to accomplish onstage. She remained fervently involved in all of the music her bandmates were creating around her, particularly the drums, which, early on in the set, she began rhythmically beating with a stick of her own.
Together, the foursome unleashed a spaced out euphoria with their sound, and the more electronic moments shone as their best. Playing equally from their two studio albums, Little Dragon and Machine Dreams, the band injected new energy and variety into many of the songs, including a gorgeous closing with “Feather,” and an encore of their most haunting melody, “Twice.” Friends who had seen their Holocene set last November said it was great to see a different kind of performance than the one they'd seen before, but that might be my only complaint. It was a fantastic showing, but with Nagano's voice sounding slightly off, and the instrumentation appearing dissimilar from the band's recordings, I was left wishing I could have seen the group in a more traditional way. But I guess that's what I get for failing to catch Little Dragon in one of last year’s shows. Thankfully, I predict they'll be back around here soon, and we'll have the wonderment of local boys Billygoat to enjoy, in the meantime.
