Indie bands pegged as the “next big thing” are a dime-a-dozen anymore. Maybe it used to mean something when bands came up slowly through college radio and touring, but now that they explode virtually overnight on the Internet, most burn out long before they have the chance to fade away. (Later, Beirut! What happened, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?)
With everyone numbed by the hype machine, it’s rare that any gig by an up-and-comer rises to the level of genuine excitement—that feeling that everybody who showed up might actually look back one day and think “I was there when…”
Who knows what will become of Swedish electro-soul band Little Dragon, but their show at the Pagoda in San Jose Thursday night managed to capture that feeling of something huge happening. Certainly that has more than a little to do with their appearance on the Gorillaz last album, and their opening slot touring the world with Damon Albarn’s group. Little Dragon also have a hotly anticipated third album on the way, which they sampled at the show.
“They’re not big yet,” one fan standing by me at the show told his friend. “But give them a year.”
It may not even take that long, judging from the response to their sold-out Pagoda show. There was a huge line for the few tickets that had been held back for the door, and after that people were being turned away.
Inside, the packed-in crowd cheered for their best-known songs like “Never Never,” “Blinking Pigs” and “After the Rain.” Hearing them re-invent these and other tracks from their self-titled 2007 debut and 2009’s Machine Dreams was a trip. Where the albums are polished, moody and almost jazzy, the live renditions were grittier and aggressive.
The notion that Little Dragon is moving toward more muscular and driving electro-dance was obvious in the selections from the under-construction album, too. Songs like “Little Man” were just plain funkier than anything they’ve done before.
Meanwhile, Swedish-Japanese lead singer Yukimi Nagano provided the visuals—I like a dance band that can dance to its own music on stage. She sang mostly with eyes cast upward, as if filling some Supreme Being in on the haps in Gothenburg.
Not every band can live up to the hype, but Little Dragon did. It was the most buzzed-about show to hit the South Bay in quite a while, and we could use more like it.
