56. Dirty Projectors

Alternate version of a review published in The Wire #341 (July 2012)

Dirty Projectors

Swing Lo Magellan

Domino CD/LP/DL

Dirty Projectors look, in retrospect, like the vanguard case of a development equally promising and problematic – the imposition on the structures of rock songwriting of cursor-dragging collage. The sudden transitions, disparate materials and what-the-heck conceptualism of their songs appeared to have internalised both the jostling data of the web-page and the production gloss and space of the 80s pop-rock and 90s R&B records beloved of guitarist and principal songwriter Dave Longstreth. (Their punchy vocal and instrumental gestures seemed to have gating already built into them.) Most of the criticisms levelled at the band came from pot-bellied rock-hacks who considered them too clever by 'alf. The day-glo novelty and invention of their work was palpable; the question remained as to how far down their syntheses really went, and what truth there was to the songs.

Longstreth's collaboration with vocalist/guitarists Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian yielded brilliant results on Rise Above (2007) and, to a lesser extent, Bitte Orca (2009), giving a more thoroughgoing and satisfying shape to his collisions of ideas, voicing the desperation, joy, erotic yearning, deadpan oddness that had been latent in previous efforts. With their help, it was clear, Longstreth had the songwriting chops to make the whole hybrid thing work. The hectic script of their vocal lines – swoops, coos, hums, whispered asides, – is, to some extent, present and correct on Swing Lo Magellan: the simple vocal crescendo on the chorus of “Gun Has No Trigger”, the sweet call-and-response yelps of “See What She Seeing”. There are a lot of initially-impressive moments – the huge explosion of drums and fuzz-guitar on the chorus of opener “Offspring Are Blank”, the lovely, fiddly mbira-pop opening to “The Socialites”, the tension-and-release dynamic of “Gun Has No Trigger”. But more often than not the band sound like they're going through the motions, constructing Dirty Projectors-by-numbers compositions – cryptic lyric, shuffling drums (drummer Brian McOmber's considerable talents are far from exploited here), acoustic bridge, if we're lucky a riff that might once have been sprightly. The digital dreamwork of their juxtapositions, structures effortlessly coming into existence from delicious melodies, has turned leaden, as if burdened by the need for capital-S significance from their conglomerations of materials; where once the proggily spiralling forms of their work had suggested an infinite capacity for invention, it now seems like a dismal scramble for shortened-span attentions, cut-and-paste ideas outrunning the band's need or will to make them live. More than that: they seem to belong to a moment that's past. Their work's profusion held a more-than-subterranean alliance with the shadow economy of the web, and the virtual bubble of financialisation that was its not-so-secret partner; theirs was the era of easy money, and they articulated the desires and strangenesses that the dream-bubble of late neoliberalism gave rise to and repressed. In its aftermath their language seems to have crumbled, to have become shallow, inadequate.

Perhaps the only moment of true greatness here comes on closer “Irresponsible Tune”, when Longstreth, over a single acoustic guitar, calls up the ghost of The Orioles' “It's Too Soon To Know”. An air of simple tragedy – “and life is pointless, harsh and long” – is focused through exhausted doo-wop harmonies: “there's a bird singin'/out in the wood/and it's singin' an irresponsible tune”. Its forlorn loveliness returns to the pure language the band have occasionally revived. In doing so, they make their first steps back towards the real pressures of our conjuncture.