Lucky Dragons

Hope in modern music isn’t a particularly easy thing to come by. It’s a scarce commodity. True hope, the kind that engages with darkness and come out the other side, all the more hopeful for it. Yet, like all the stockbrokers desperately investing gold in these times of crisis, there’s a select band of American musicians who deal almost only in hope. Tonight three of them gather in Kilburn’s Luminaire.

Take Lucky Dragons, for starters. Generic London transport difficulties mean I get to the venue only in time to catch the last two songs of their set, Luke Fishbeck kneeling at the centre of a circle of audience participants, sitting cross-legged, holding hands. The watchword with Lucky Dragons is community... or maybe communication. The music itself full of cautious, friendly blips and glitches: it’s organic electronica. Indeed, if there’s any message that we should take from the music of Lucky Dragons, it's that technology doesn’t have to be alienating – you can make modern, technological music that still sounds real and animal, that breathes and decays.

It’s a message that Barr is keen to get home, his stream of consciousness spoken word music drifting in and out of topics and moods. Yet, still the fundamental theme here is one of personal empowerment; the idea that we all have the autonomy to shape our own lives. If things aren’t going well we can change that, or at less use negativity to fuel creation. Like when on ‘The Song Is The Single’ he tells us how his last record, Summary, was made after he fell ill on tour in England. Or on ‘Half of Two Times Two’, when we hear that “politics is not necessarily guerrilla fighters or prime ministers... it’s also who am I in relation to you”. Amen.

By the time Vice Cooler, a.k.a. Hawnay Troof, takes to the stage the crowd has thinned out a bit, but Cooler urges us forward to make it “less weird for both of us”. He tells us about his past month, a story littered with awful coincidences and tragic accidents – a drum kit falling on his head, a dog bite, police corruption. Yet, he tells us, it’s playing shows like tonight that make it seem worthwhile. He seems to mean it, a sentiment in keeping with the general atmosphere of the music tonight. Hawnay Troof as a live act falls somewhere between Har Mar Superstar and YACHT, a kind of deranged, beautifully energetic electro-showman. Halfway through the set he rips off his trousers to reveal leopard skin y-fronts, dancing over the stage into the crowd, and then leaping back on stage with a flying roll. Like the other acts tonight, he demands that you connect with the music, even if its only on a cursory level. Their music, after all, is ours to adopt and appropriate. Their hope is ours too.