Little Dragon + VV Brown at Lincoln Hall: review + photo gallery

Warming up Lincoln Hall for impending headliner Little Dragon last Thursday, VV Brown nonetheless commanded a decent turnout of her own fans, and in some respects it was easy to see why.

She is a commanding frontwoman with a booming voice and sturdy chops, and her backing band was more than competent at rolling out grooves that ranged from '50s rockabilly to Fela-style Afrobeat rip-offs.

The issue with VV Brown comes when you dig a layer deeper and discover the hollow void that is a lack of real sincerity or originality.

Sure, there are a couple of songs in her catalog that manage to avoid generic references to love—of each other, the world or "music" in its most general sense—but by midway through her set, it took a turn for the lamely cookie-cutter worse.

Her shtick became a blind appeal to the lowest common denominator, with each new song beginning with question, "Do you like _______?" Insert genre here. Do we like reggae? Do we like hip-hop? Do we like rock & roll? The last of these left her sounding like Estelle fronting the Brian Setzer Orchestra (if you find yourself thinking this might be cool, it wasn't). VV Brown is talented—there's no question of this—but she does not have a voice or level of taste that is her own; it is just a composite of ideas that a marketing team thought might be good for her. So, as she ended the show introducing her band of merry Williamsburgians, it just felt as if you were listening to a really popular wedding band.

Little Dragon, on the other hand, is nothing if not a refined and unique voice. What it is about the Scandinavian sensibility that has the region churning out a disproportionate amount of gorgeous, moody and introspective pop music, no one knows. Maybe it's something in the water; they have a lot of it. Regardless, Little Dragon is a band that is unafraid of being itself. Of course it has its influences, ranging from indie rock to folk music to downtempo to house, but in opposition to VV Brown's case, the band has incorporated each of its inspirations into a cohesive whole. Some songs, like set opener "A New" sparkled with an almost cosmic jazz structure, no one instrument dominating the mix, but all of its pieces working in unison to create a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. Others, like "Never Never" veered into extended edits of their original selves, morphing from indie dance pop into instrumental house jams. Lead singer Yukimi Nagano was hypnotizing, dancing daintily around the stage with an ankh-shaped tambourine before returning to the microphone to belt out pitch-perfect jazz croonings. Reviewing Little Dragon's latest LP, Machine Dreams, last November, I said its first album seemed like interpretations in various styles, whereas the new one was a more well-rounded and mature record. If the band can come into its own that quickly, hopefully VV Brown can too.