Sunday Night Spotlight | No. 3 | (on a Tuesday)

your guess is as good as mine

Little Dragon is a Swedish pop group. Among other things I've professed my love for on here, European sugar-pop is probably my biggest guilty pleasure of any. It makes no sense to me: I hate things that sound like the 80's. I hate pop music (in its current state). But I love Swedish people. Okay, I've only ever seen one Swede in my life that I know of, and that was Lykke Li. But I imagine they're all just as cool as her. I'm extrapolating here. Either way, Little Dragon are at least deserving of a Sunday Night Spotlight -- even if it is Tuesday.

They make slightly downtempo and dreamy pop, and lead singer Yukimi Nagano (yes, half-Japanese, half-Swedish), sounds eerily similar to Lykke Li, which is probably why I like Little Dragon so much in the first place. The quirky instrumentation is definitely there, mixing slippery drums with synthesizers, whistle noises, and even one song seemingly sampling that noise Mario made when he jumped up. Yukimi's flighty voice is the perfect compliment to all the above, delivering an airy accompaniment in cutely endearing English. There's so much summer in recent release Machine Dreams that it's a shame it just came to this side of the ocean in the fall.

Little Dragon - Never Never

"Never Never" is probably as downtempo as Little Dragon actually gets, but it still carries with it a bit of swagger, lilting along on the strength of the drum hits and Nagano's perfectly up-and-down, side-to-side vocals. It has a bit of a lounge-y feel to it in the verses, but never feels old or staid thanks to smile-inducing bridge and chorus, with its synthesizers working on overtime to produce the desired pick-me-up. When you listen to a song like this and call it "pop," you're ostensibly putting in it in the same dimension as the tunes you hear when you turn on the radio. But all you hear on the dial is a bastardization of the genre -- Little Dragon delivers pop music with a retro vibe, and in the way it's supposed to be heard.

Little Dragon - Swimming

"Swimming" on the flip-side is Little Dragon at its quirkiest. "ooooh-oooh"s abound, and the simple piano chords lay down the basis of a boy-girl story -- told on top of a tune you could easily imagine soundtracking a silent film, at the part where the couple-to-be is running around the park, playing a most-flirtatious round of hide-and-seek, peeking out from the trees just in time to see their crush and run off to their next hiding spot. (Wow, if that's not evocative enough - whether good or bad - I don't know what is. Try imaging Charlie Chaplin and seeing the whole thing in black-and-white and that might help a bit.)

Yukimi is good at some juxtaposition of sultry and kooky, her voice emoting both at different times, with the aide of that complimentary instrumentation. On top of "Swimming" and "Never Never," there's a few other tracks from Machine Dreams that border on dream-pop, thanks to their deft use of atmospherics and space. It just goes to prove that what you don't use is just as important as what you do -- silence is not nothing, it is simply the absence of sound, and sound and silence have to work in an effective tandem to make music truly great. Little Dragon know when to carry on a beat, when to cut it short, when to change it up. Sometimes they may over-indulge, like the "why'd they do that?" break on "Looking Glass," but largely, Machine Dreams is an enjoyable album, full of everything there is to love about 80's-tinged European pop music at the moment.

Buy Machine Dreams here: Amazon