Little Dragon – Ritual Union
Peacefrog
When a marginal band strikes gold, the temptation is to snatch for the insufferability megaphone and tell everyone you saw it coming. Those fingers twitch with particular urgency in the case of Ritual Union and Gothenburg’s Little Dragon, whose fragmented soul-pop’s arrival at the mainstream is not so much ‘surprise visit’ as ‘scheduled appointment’ — slotting in just after The xx bottled post-coital bliss without climaxing and moments before every dog and its owner’s wife inevitably starts trying to funk out with a tantalisingly low-key, barely-there essence.
Up to now the steamy foursome has performed an awkwardly euphoric balancing act on the cusp of accessibility, too clever by half to jump the shark before mastering wonky-soul glitch-groove but too subtly melodic, light of touch and, frankly, Swedish of sensibility to put a jittering foot wrong. Ritual Union is a gentle resurfacing of their landscape, sliding every sliver of triangle that fractional beat closer to the pulse, every finger of synth to its rightful place, by the most gradual increments, until it starts to resemble some wildly zig-zagging contortion of pop — or some future-soul collab, perhaps, between Erykah Badu and Micachu, co-produced by the esteemed cast of Hyperdub on Ice.
That’s not to say they’ve made any headstrong detours down the aisle of predictability; rather, they’ve tempered their already loose and limber jams with fleeting glimpses of gruesomely mashed-up melody (‘When I Go Out in October’) and lurching technological whirrs every bit as thrillingly original as they are familiar (‘Ritual Union’). The result is a gently propulsive, alt.soul heavyweight, and with plaudits rolling in from pop-godheads like Damon Albarn, Dave Sitek, DJ Shadow and Andre 3000, the spotlight surely beckons. Hark, Little Dragon! Now scale the heights of your winged ambition! Jazz Monroe
