Album Review: "Swing Lo Magellan" by the Dirty Projectors
Image Courtesy of Domino Records
By Lenika Cruz
July 8, 2012 12:43 p.m.
Swing Lo Magellan
Dirty Projectors
Domino Records
Generally characterized along the lines of indie or experimental, Dirty Projectors has released albums time and time again that keep its genre hazy. Ecstatic, mostly difficult-to-hum-along-to polyphonies are the band’s home turf.
Dirty Projectors’ newest album “Swing Lo Magellan” is maddeningly catchy and weird, boasting more funky thrummings (as in the wonderful track “Gun Has No Trigger”) and intimate songwriting (but no fewer vocal harmonies) than 2009’s “Bitte Orca.” But it is also one of the band’s more listenable ““ aka more pop-sounding ““ records yet.
Before singing the album’s first lines in “Offspring Are Blank,” Dave Longstreth clears his throat audibly: “First there was a single one, then there were ten. With ten made a hundred, and a hundred million.” The imagery of insane growth and mutation complements the band’s often chaotic, propulsive sound.
Dirty Projectors’ sound writ large has a counterintuitiveness to it that almost resists catchiness. Listen to the same song (like the popular “Stillness is the Move”) over and over again, and it won’t get “old” ““ the arrangements are simply too strange to encourage complacency in the listener. But “Swing Lo Magellan” is uber-listenable, mainly because at this point in its musical growth, the band has become quite good at weaving into its songs an infectious thread ““ it’s an invitation to multiple re-listens that usually rewards the patient listener.
“Swing Lo Magellan” is all crystalline guitars, clean and bright (best heard in “Just From Chevron”), with brief hints of breathy atmospherics (in the second half of “Dance For You”) and forlorn twanging (in “Maybe That Was It”). Each song on this album provides a good case study for principles that hold firm in Dirty Projectors’ style.
The lyrics swing from the comically weighty (“If there ever is the impregnable question of what did or did not pass / it would help to seek comfort in destiny”) almost instantly to the childish and transparent (“but I need you / and you’re always on my mind). The listener’s attention vacillates between the often unconventional lyrics and the seemingly improvised quality of their delivery. Longstreth’s voice slides up and down the scales comfortably, frequently wavering for prolonged periods at the higher end.
When Longstreth’s voice strains to the higher notes ““ for example, in the album’s title track (also the shortest track at just over two and a half minutes) ““ it evokes an unselfconscious, folksy earnestness that pulls together all the odd tail ends of the band’s nebulous style.
The album has a warm, unfinished feel to it ““ much like an unvarnished mahogany table that retains its slight but conspicuous cracks and graininess. Throughout the album, the band members’ murmurings, chuckles and voiced asides pepper the background. Listening to “Unto Caesar” feels like having stumbled into an informal jam session. Between the bleating guitars and Longstreth’s howling, the other members can be heard laughing and talking to each other: “When should we bust in the harmony?” and “That doesn’t make any sense, what you just said.” Its candidness makes it the most fun song on the album.
For all its bombast, “Swing Lo Magellan” isn’t overly polished or slick. It’s the band’s sixth studio album, but Dirty Projectors hasn’t gotten arrogant or too comfortable with its experimentation. It seems that it has struck a comfortable medium between the avant-garde it has become known for and a newer sound that might garner the band a larger audience. As Longstreth notes in “Offspring Are Blank”: “The flame is contagious, but the heat feels alright.”
