Dirty Projectors is the alias for New York-based singer/songwriter
Dave Longstreth, who had debuted under his own name with the home-made
The Graceful Fallen Mango (This Heart Plays Records, 2002).
The lo-fi feeling was still prevalent on The Glad Fact (Western Vinyl, 2003),
although the degree of eccentricity had already skyrocketed.
After a surreal instrumental overture, Glad Fact mimicks the vocal
harmonies of the doo-wop era but then turns into a neurotic psychodrama
of shrieks and laments.
Off Science Hill sounds like a misguided attempt to recreate the
atmosphere of a ballad from the same age.
Ground Underfoot digs even deeper, into smoky nocturnal lounge jazz.
Naked We Made It mocks the jangling folk-rock style of the 1960s.
A retro feeling exudes also from My Offwhite Flag, that may
sound like an exotic-tinged ditty by the
Drifters before the
madhouse drums and horns move centerstage.
It's the madhouse element that prevails, though, in songs such as the
lopsided David Thomas-esque litany
Boredom Is A Product,
the introverted blues dirge Lit From Below,
and
the neoclassical ballad sung in an operatic register over an
obsessive quasi-boogie rhythm Three Brown Finches.
Further misplaced is the shapeless
Imaginary Love, with
gospel organ and twangy guitar.
The arrangements are spartan, somewhat irrational and sometimes plain
out-of-tune.
The musical nadir of skeletal lullabies such as
Like Fake Blood in Crisp October
(that mauls a melody worthy of Queen)
and
Two Brown Finches
(that squanders a melody worthy of a Broadway musical)
pushes Longstreth far away from the center of mass of lo-fi
songwriters of the 1990s.
Proud of his vocal gift, Longstreth tended to howl his confessions rather than
whisper them. Facing up his inner ghosts, he let his voice waver,
crack, whip and soar.
Longstreth came through as a hybrid being,
like a cross between Andrew Bird and Sufjan Stevens, capable of vocal gymnastics that challeges
the dogmas of singing.
After the Internet release Morning Better Last (States Rights, 2003),
that collected unreleased material from three triple albums of 2001 and 2002,
Slaves' Graves and Ballads (Western Vinyl, 2004),
that collects the material of two prior EPs, refined the project
by adding the arrangements of a ten-piece chamber orchestra (the Orchestral
Society for the Preservation of the Orchestra) on a group of songs
that further enhanced the melodramatic element as well as
the eccentric nature of his performance.
On the Beach conveys his psychosis through a surreal luxuriant
soundscape that wed the VanDyke Parks and
Bjork.
Hazard Lights is an odd blend of traditional folk music and avantgarde
symphonic music.
The grand aria of Grandfather's Hanging is dwarfed by
baroque and romantic passages.
The peak of pathos is achieved in Grandfather's Hanging, a gentle lullaby
punctuated by martial and jarring arrangements.
The second EP (for just voice and acoustic guitar) basically represents
the alter-ego of this ornate music, but ultimately
it sticks to the same loud and neurotic persona.
The naked and whispered Unmoved,
the tiptoeing meditation of Since I Opened
and the serenade-like croon of
Ladies You Have Exiled Me,
focus on his lyrical (and sane) side, and complement the
turbulent bard of the first half.
The man has never sounded so sober and linear as on this EP.
The Getty Address (Western Vinyl, 2005) is an over-reaching effort
that loses most of the captivating idiosyncracies of
The Glad Fact
as it tries to live up to avantgarde compositional techniques and
post-modern deconstruction theory.
The orchestral experiments of
Slaves' Graves and Ballads form the foundations for songs that
are scored for the most unlikely combinations of voices and instruments.
Not all of them work, but
I Sit on the Ridge at Dusk for women's choir, cowbells and orchestra,
D. Henley's Dream for fluttering orchestra and ghostly choir (perhaps
the most intriguing score),
Time Birthed Spilled Blood for strings and drum loops (sung by a female
guest vocalist),
and especially Warholian Wigs for orchestra, glockenspiel, guitar and several percussion instruments,
rank among the most creative pieces yet assembled by the digital generation.
The female choir, in particular, is much more than just a decoration, acquiring
the status of lead "voice" in Gilt Gold Scabs,
and dueting with the singer in Finches' Song At Oceanic Parking Lot like
bacchants in a Greek tragedy.
The creative nonsense of The Glad Fact is still alive and kicking only
in musical puzzles such as I Will Truck,
Ponds & Puddles and especially
Not Having Found, whose digital effects, intricate vocal counterpoint,
syncopated drum loops and horns evoke the
exotic and decadent music-hall of Kevin Ayers.
His passion for popular music of the past still yields
Tour Along the Potomac for handclap, glockenspiel, drums and trumpet,
a tribute of sorts to the jazz age, and
Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego, a disco shuffle fronted by a soul falsetto.
This was the Dirty Projectors' most difficult album yet, a painstakingly
assembled charade of more psychological than aural events.
The neurotic introspection of The Glad Fact had turned into an
enigmatic and unbalance form of extroversion.
The Getty Address is occasionally terrific and terribly occasional.
Rise Above (Dead Oceans, 2007) was a reinterpretation of Black
Flag's Damaged. Not just a tribute album, but a song-by-song
alteration of the original sound and spirit: lightning-speed
guitar riffs turned into orchestral passages, angrily
shouted refrains turned into crooning or multi-part vocal harmonies,
dissonance turned into muzak.
Rather than covers these are remixes, as Dave Longstreth takes an unlimited
number of liberties with the original material.
It almost sounds like an insult to the memory of a hero. A sort of post-mortem
censorship.
Bitte Orca (Domino, 2009) achieved a more uniform synthesis of the
two artistic egos of Longstreth's schizophrenia:
the eccentric and precarious constructs of The Glad Fact versus
the classy and intricate orchestration of The Getty Address.
The result disappoints in Cannibal Resource, that sounds like
a funky-soul ballad covered by a group of noise-rock circa 1985
(by the likes of Polvo).
Fluorescent Half Dome is an even more serious stab at languid
balladry.
Another dancefloor ditty, Stillness Is The Move, fares better on
account of the almost a-cappella female vocals
(Amber Coffman)
over a catchy syncopated beat.
But this is another act, only vaguely related to the original mission of the
Dirty Projectors.
The jarring and convoluted Temecula Sunrise, however, shows
how the concept can still succeed: the vocals span a number of styles
while the guitar grates, the drums fiddle around aimlessly and the female choir
pretends to know which melody is being sung.
The Bride reinvents the format of the folk elegy juxtaposing
hard-rock riffs and old-fashioned choral hums.
Remade Horizon is so volatile that it sounds like the mix of a
hysterical dj, although with strong African overtones.
Another female lead carries the gentle neoclassical melody of
Two Doves in a simple scenario, barely perturbed by low-key strings.
This is a third strand of the album, hardly related to the other two.
Useful Chamber sort of mixes all three strands. There is a simple
folk-soul melody, there is a disco beat, there is a female choir; but then
a discordant guitar abruptly breaks the mold, the drums slow down, and the
wordless female choir takes the lead, although it doesn't seem to have
a song to sing. Longstreth rants like
Van Morrison at his most delirious, and
then delves into a hard-rock jam.
Longstreth has rediscovered the classic song format, and the result is far
less personal than before.
Mount Wittenberg Orca (2010) was a collaboration with
Bjork
Continuing the descent into simple, traditional, radio-friendly structures,
Swing Lo Magellan (Domino, 2012) is the album of a derivative
singer-songwriter (Dave Longstreth) who has listened to a lot of pop hits of
the 1960s (and even earlier decades):
Offspring Are Blank harks back to
the operatic hard-rock of the
Queen,
Gun Has No Trigger is a
Paul McCartney-ian ballad,
Swing Lo Magellan evokes Bob Dylan circa 1964,
Dance for You echoes Phil Spector's hits,
Impregnable Question matches a stuttering ska beat with a
Prince-ian elegy,
and Irresponsible Tune even travels back to the era of doo-wop vocal
groups. None of these would have made it to the albums of the originals.
There are a few eccentric moments that link back to the band's early days,
from the
sub-bass enhanced digital balladry of The Socialites (with Amber Coffman again on lead vocals)
to Maybe That Was It, that surprisingly slides into
Art Bears-like jazz-rock.
The return to simplicity has come full circle.
Meanwhile Longstreth was clearly drifting out of indie-rock and towards
neosoul and rap via collaborations with
Kanye West,
Rihanna
and
Solange.
Amber Coffman, having dumped her boyfriend Dave Longstreth, debuted solo with
City Of No Reply (2017), while
Dave Longstreth kept the band's name alive (but without the band)
with the break-up concept Dirty Projectors (Domino, 2017).
Engineered by veteran Jimmy Douglass (and frequent Timbaland collaborator),
this is possibly the most baroque break-up concept ever.
Each song is vivisected and reconstructed through meticulous cut-up and
glitchy arrangements.
The opening dirge Keep Your Name is littered with tiny sound effects
and even includes a rap intermezzo.
The slow ballads Little Bubble and
Ascent Through Clouds (meant to be the emotional peaks) each has
so many sonic distractions that such distractions
constitute de facto a parallel (and more interesting) song.
The soundscape and the song are not well integrated, which grants the
landscape a life of its own. Decoupling the two makes each weaker instead
of making the whole stronger.
Death Spiral alternates between colloquial singing and hysterical
falsetto and in between adds and subtracts all sorts of nuances.
The seven-minute Up in Hudson begins with a horn fanfare and ends with a distorted Afro-electronic percussive coda.
The Caribbean shuffle Cool Your Heart, a duet with Dawn Richard (cowritten with Solange), is a bit more coherent but still bombarded with electronic sounds.
Even less contaminated is I See You, an odd novelty that sounds like a gospel organist performing UB40's reggae version of Sonny & Cher's I Got You Babe and then straddling into a cover of Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale while the preacher reaches deep into his soul and sees the light.
The problem is that, stripped of the sonic detours, the songs would be plain
and tedious, so one tends to judge them based on the sonic detours, not
on the bulk of the music (which would be pretty monotonous); which of course
makes one wonder why he wasted energies writing down the melodies and the
lyrics, especially since his crooning is not exactly "music" and his
lyrics are not terribly interesting.
Just like other famous break-up albums
(Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks,
Nick Cave's The Boatman’s Call,
Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak and
Beck’s Sea Change), the break-up does not provide the best
inspiration of the artist's music:
it mostly highlights the artistic limitations.
Lamp Lit Prose (2018).
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