Throughout much of the past decade, dance-oriented electronic-leaning pop music has erred on the side of stark utility, reducing beats and hooks down to an elemental thud and grind. What tends to get lost in this sparsely arranged music, particularly when we're dealing with lesser artists and total hacks, is color and atmosphere. Without these things, songs can feel incredibly clinical and soulless-- throbbing grooves almost completely devoid of context. Little Dragon, a quartet from Gothenburg, Sweden, are not entirely removed from the electro and modern R&B influences of their time, but their arrangements make a point of foregrounding ambiance and texture. Whereas too many post-Timbaland, post-electroclash records can seem like sentences stripped of adjectives and proper nouns, the tones on the group's sophomore album Machine Dreams suggest complex emotions and vivid scenery with exquisite detail.
The emphasis on atmosphere is made clear from the very start of Machine Dreams, as album opener "A New" begins and ends with electronic drones, as if to bracket the song in ellipses like an unfinished thought. The subsequent song, "Looking Glass", is firmer, more beat-driven, but as much as its groove is steady, as a whole it seems to wander. Motion and physicality is strongly implied by the rhythm, but the leisurely pace and subtly shifting keyboard tones indicate changes in setting, evoking a sense that we're stumbling around lost in some strange, beautiful city. This sets the tone for the rest of the album, which goes off on the tangents of different rhythms into other textural zones, but maintains a feeling of searching around for something, whether it is a person, a destination, a state of mind, or the right words to express some ineffable thought.
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.
Machine Dreams is at once familiar and slightly alien, and the emotional center is both intuitively obvious and intentionally vague. Nagano is the type of writer and singer who lets her words roughly sketch out a feeling that she embellishes with her voice. This approach puts more faith in the unique effects of music-- there is no sense in being direct and literal when singing can convey the sort of nuance that is almost impossible to express in other forms of communication. The album falters slightly when the music becomes more abstract and inscrutable, but on the whole it is not difficult to relate to Nagano or slip into the mood created by her bandmates. That mood is slippery and hard to define, but that's not so much a problem as it is part of the appeal, as the band navigate the strange spaces between big, easily identifiable emotions.
