Lucky Dragons: Dream Island Laughing Language

Lucky Dragons remind me of a West Coast version of Brooklyn’s High Places on their new album Dream Island Laughing Language. The Los Angeles duo of Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara (and the occasional collaborators) has been making music since 2000 and has seven albums and something like 18 releases under their belts, so maybe the comparison should be the other way around.

Dream Island marks one of the unusual instances in the group’s discography where the band made the decision to craft and album consisting of “conventional” songs. I use “conventional” lightly, Dream Island as compared to their free-form past, stacks up more as a traditional album. It may be a step in the conventional sense for Lucky Dragons that the record’s twenty-two tracks are built on the frenzied elements of pop, but for the listener, it’s like stepping into a trippy dream set on a deserted island in the southern Pacific. Handmade meets digital as primitive sounds from instruments including rocks, poppies, hands, necklaces, and bowls, along with basic sounds of mbiras, bongos, flutes, bells, and jagged electronic interruptions are cut and pasted into delicately woven experimental pop songs.

With their handmade aesthetic, Lucky Dragons knit themes of ecstatic language, folk melodies, messages of unrest,and AM radio rave-ups into this genre transcending record. The live incarnation of Lucky Dragons breaks down the barrier between audience and band where audience members may find themselves physically interacting by complimenting each other or generating sounds via skin to skin contact, causing those of us squeamish about audience participation to duck for cover.

Dream Island Laughing Language is out now on Marriage Records. Check the band’s MySpace page for upcoming area shows. There are four scheduled in New York City in the next couple of weeks.

[MP3]: Lucky Dragons  ”Givers”
Dream Island Laughing Language, Marriage; 2008