Dirty Projectors’ album Lamp Lit Prose; the long, uphill journey of cyclist David Millar in Time Trial
With his new album, Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth finds his happy, happy place
Quite how Dirty Projectors make pop
songs is something of a miracle. Everything about their music seems to test and strain the boundaries of genre, and yet the form remains visible — like a Thomas Heatherwick sculpture, or the crypt-keeper wasp, whose larvae grow inside the body of other species before popping out through their heads. Frontman/mastermind Dave Longstreth’s vocals spiral like a drunken Slinky, horns and samples burst in unexpectedly, drums stutter and stop and start again. It shouldn’t
work, and yet.
And yet Dirty Projectors make some of the most life-affirming, funky, peculiar
music out there right now, and their new album, Lamp Lit Prose, only furthers
that rep. The album is their eighth — Longstreth started the Dirty Projectors project in his dorm room at Yale in 2001 — and finds him recalibrating his sound after his last album, Dirty Projectors, a lower-key affair which dealt with his break-up with long-term band mate
Amber Coffman.
The sounds on Lamp Lit Prose, recorded at his studio in LA, are wildly eclectic, from the Afrobeat bounce of “Break-Thru” to the end-of-the-prom haze
of album closer “(I Wanna) Feel It All” to “Blue Bird”, a ballad that sounds like a traditional English folk song rearranged by Stevie Wonder. Longstreth has brought
back guitars — he’s never feared a wigged-out solo — and vibrant girl-boy call-and-response harmonies, as well as roping in collaborators including Fleet
Foxes’ Robin Pecknold and Rostam, ex of Vampire Weekend. Lamp Lit Prose is an exuberant, eccentric blast that somehow hangs together as a gorgeous, delicate whole.