Get live
I went to see Little Dragon play live last week, for the second time in a month. Seeing them up close and personal rather than on a festival stage made me really fall for them, and realise why they are such “musicians’ musicians”: they are a tough little unit, and what they do has a genuine live feel without sounding like a rock band doing dance or vice versa.
This video gets how they got a groove going on this track in particular but it’s a bit more restrained, being a performance for telly - at the Boiler Room session they definitely kicked out the jams a bit more.
How club music can or can’t use performance has been on my mind, as also last week I got sent the upcoming album by Joakim. He is one of the most under-appreciated artists in the game for my money - easily the equal of the more famous likes of LCD Soundsystem, Junior Boys or Hot Chip when it comes to song-based electronic music, and his set supporting Junior Boys at Dingwalls a few years back remains one of my all time favourite shows.
But his and Little Dragon’s performances remain exceptions that prove the rule… It is still very hard for club/electronic artists to compete in a live infrastructure that was entirely built around rock bands. Here is an article I did a couple of months back about why this might be, and how it might be changing. There is a lot more to examine on this topic, though.
