David Longstreth has given up trying to challenge us.
Or maybe he’s just challenging us so much now we don’t even care anymore.
Whatever the case, on his Dirty Projectors’ latest release, Swing Lo Magellan, he’s managed to somehow harness all that skittering musical avant-garde-ness of his into perhaps the band’s most easily accessible album yet.
In the past, the Brooklyn modern minstrel’s work has ranged from an intentional Afropop misremembering of a Black Flag record to a chopped-and-screwed chamber orchestra samplefest and a glitch opera about a suicidal Don Henley. Yeah, nobody else really gets it either. Even on the band’s stellar 2009 breakout Bitte Orca, despite the quality of the music itself, one often had little to no clue what nonsensical subject matter Longstreth was singing about, although the album’s succulent blend of streamlined, West African-spritzed baroque rock gave us little room to complain.
But with Swing Lo Magellan, as Longstreth and crew take yet another new step in their ever-changing musical saga, for once it seems like they may have made more than just a lateral move.
In some ways, the new album doesn’t really measure up musically to the sheer completeness of Bitte Orca. While their trademark vocal harmonies still thrive, alive and well in a relatively sparse new musical landscape, the band appears to have largely abandoned the walls of sound and tastefully slick production values present during the Orca era for a stripped-back drywall of lower-key beats, handclaps, and large open spaces. At times, when the odd electric guitar foolery or crash-ba-bash drum kit crops up, such as on “Maybe That Was It”, it still sounds hollow and unpolished compared to the last record.
Hell, even the ARTWORK feels unpolished compared to the last record.
However, for the most part, this minimalist approach (which, according to Longstreth, was 100 percent intentional) helps the album as an album more than it hinders it, hacking back Bitte Orca‘s dense undergrowth of overwhelming artful motifs to give the lyrics and content room to breathe, allowing the SONGS themselves to move to the forefront. And that is exactly the point of Swing Lo Magellan. “It’s an album of songs,” Longstreth has said in multiple interviews (57 by his count), “an album of songwriting.”
According to Longstreth, the sound of the new album was inspired by his recent fascination with hip-hop beats and the simple folk music of artists like Neil Young and Blind Willie – “just how sparse that music is. Just this idea — the grain of it, the rawness of it and the simplicity of it. The directness of the language. Dirty Projectors has been moving toward that kind of sonic simplicity for a little while. I just find it’s thrilling when there’s nothing going on in the speakers.”
On Swing Lo Magellan, the simplicity speaks for itself. No longer does the band leave layman listeners head-scratching as to what’s a bitte orca, or what kind of pretentious indie shit is this, or what in earthly hell did that weird-voiced dude just say. (Even at one point during the album, one of the girls mutters in the background, “Um, that doesn’t make any sense, what you just said.”) Rather, their new style allows us to understand the complex emotions and ideas that Longstreth has been funneling into his intricate compositions for so long, but without the heady musical clutter the Projectors have hitherto been so fond of. It only takes one listen through “See What She Seeing” to realize that this is just Longstreth singing about his dream girl, in the subtlest of poetic terms; not about any pompous, grandiose theological mystery. See there? These songs aren’t structured like shapeshifting orchestral compositions or complicated Afro-freak jams; they’re structured like SONGS.
Example: that chilling lead single “Gun Has No Trigger”. Good God, what a single. This is probably the most straightforward, simple song the band has ever released, yet it stands as the centerpiece of the album for its stirring style and rousing delivery. Grooving over only a simple snare-kick-bass rhythm section – literally, that’s it, there’s nothing else in the song – Longstreth and his female cohorts, Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle, show off their finest vocal chops in simple jazzy 4/4 time. Slithering through a masterful chord progression that takes the listener on a journey upwards, much like the deliberate melodies of an old Christian hymn, Longstreth spouts reprimandory lyrics to an unknown subject (he’s said the song is about the impossibility of meaningful activism) with all the fiery soul of a Baptist preacher before spiraling out and parachuting back earthward in a glorious culmination, lofted by the girls’ soaring backing harmonies. MY GOD. SO SIMPLE. BUT SO POWERFUL.
Sorry, I got a little carried away there. Where was I?
Right, right, the simplicity of the album. It’s capital-S Songs like this one that differentiate this album from everything the band has ever produced in the past. It’s not that the band has given up challenging listeners. (OK, I know that I said that in the very first paragraph. I changed my mind. Sue me.) It’s just that they’re finally challenging listeners in the right ways. Challenging them to accept an album structured as a pop album but often delivered counterpoint to what we’ve come to view as the traditional pop paradigm. Challenging them to accept the band’s cheeky brand of avant-garde, percussionistic prep-prog when it’s finally dished out without all the complex time signature reduxes and too-deep lyrics, now injected with a healthy dosage of gamboling hip-hop groove, intravenous electronica, and sprightly guitar lines that refuse to be backhanded by any snooty and/or ignorant naysayers. (Well, except “Maybe That Was It”, where it just sounds like the band forgot they were supposed to be making a poppy album now and inexplicably reverted to their circa-2006 Dirty Projector selves for a single track. It’s pretty weird. Skip that track, please. Thank you.)
BUT ASIDE FROM THAT…
Swing Lo Magellan is hard to pin down to any single genre, but it does have one overarching theme to it, and that is “accessability”. Whether through the h0ney-sweet folksy chorus of “Impregnable Question” – “You’re my love, and I want you in my life” – or the jarring, yet perfectly-placed electric breakdown on opener “Offspring Are Blank”, the album takes us to that place to which past Projectors works attempted to transport us. But it does it not by entirely subverting the band’s style, but rather deftly interpolating it into the new straightforward structures which Longstreth has chosen to pursue. Into simple, straightforward, sensible, structured, sonofabitchtheseareSONGS.
“I just don’t want to do the same thing over and over again,” says Longstreth. “I do feel like the hardest thing is to do something simple and tap into whatever remains of our common language rather than cultivating your own willfully esoteric vocabulary… I’ve been obsessed with arrangement for a long time, and this one is not about that. It’s about the words and the language and the melodies.”
And lord, how he hit that nail on the head with this record.
“With our songs, we are outlaws; with our songs, we’re alone,” sings Longstreth on closer “Irresponsible Tune”. “But without songs, we’re lost, and life is pointless, harsh, and long.”
If anything, that’s what the band wants us to understand with this record. Instead of leaving us lost and wondering in a disorderly, confusing world, Swing Lo Magellan simply steers us in a new direction, to a safe haven of sorts, still sailing the course on the vessel of their one-of-a-kind sound.
Yet somehow, they still remain true to their original mission: to make the job of us music critics reviewing their work goddamn near impossible.
RATING: A-
RELEASED: July 10, 2012 on Domino Records
MUST-HEARS: “Gun Has No Trigger”, “Offspring Are Blank”, “About To Die”, “Just From Chevron”, “Impregnable Question”, “Dance For You”, “The Socialites”, “See What She Seeing”
DON’T FEEL BAD IF YOU SKIP: “Maybe That Was It”, and possibly the title track, but probably not
SOUNDS LIKE: David Longstreth moved from his native Brooklyn, where all “those weird bands” seem to originate, to Manhattan, the hub of American civilization, to learn what actual MODERN AMERICAN culture sounds like and then make an album about it in his typical anti-American style. (Which is actually totally the opposite of what he really did, which was move to the wilderness of upstate New York and take an 11-month sabbatical in an isolated log cabin with bandmate and girlfriend Amber Coffman, where they probably just made out a lot and occasionally practiced a few vocal runs over his extensive Lil Wayne collection.)
PERFECT FOR: Introducing to your friends as, “Hey, look at this awesome new band I found, think you’ll really enjoy them, HA, JUST KIDDING, it’s the exact same band I showed you when they released their LAST album and you said that time that they sucked.” Then you will cackle maniacally and throw up a gloved fist to all the snobby critics who enjoy throwing around words like “pretentious” to describe such music.
Or not.
IN A WORD: Adaptative. (NOT selling out, it’s different, so wipe that smirk off your face, hipsters.)
Watch the Apple-inspired music video for “Gun Has No Trigger” HERE
and stream the whole album while reading a tasty Longstreth interview HERE
and HERE is a rather entertaining track-by-track review published by some Pulitzer-worthy newshound from San Francisco which you really owe it to yourself to read. It probably explains everything better than I did. But even if it does, remember, you heard it HERE.
– retnuH
Hear Here! 