‘Dirty Projectors’ is the year’s first great album
2017 just got its first musical masterpiece.
Dirty Projectors ( **** out of four) is the inaugural solo venture of singer/guitarist David Longstreth, who up until now, welcomed a rotating crew of musicians and vocalists into his Brooklyn-based indie-rock outfit Dirty Projectors. The most prominent member was Amber Coffman, whose airy vocals carried the band’s pulsing 2009 hit Stillness is
the Move, but she left the group in 2013 after she and then-boyfriend Longstreth broke up.
The dramatic disintegration of their romantic relationship is the through line of Dirty Projectors’ self-titled seventh album, which Longstreth recorded amidst his work on Coffman’s solo effort, due this year. (According to a recent
New York Times profile, they have, for the most part, not spoken since late 2015.) Although fans will need to wait to hear her side of the story, Longstreth drops plenty of hints why their love might have soured over the course of nine meticulously crafted songs, capturing the tumult, tears and eventual time-healed wounds of a split.
The seeds of discord are planted in opener Keep Your Name, a glitchy blend of pitch-shifted vocals and programmed drums in which he accuses Coffman of chasing fame while he sought “truth” from art. Daggers continue to fly in the chaotic Death
Spiral, as he insists they’re enemies but concedes that he “never learned to let you breathe” and “condescended relentlessly.” The horns-laced Up in Hudson and squelching Work Together piece together a rosier, more optimistic timeline of their relationship, just before Longstreth surrenders to despair on rueful R&B ballad Little Bubble.
“I want to sleep with no dreams, I want to be dead,” he croons in a cool falsetto, yearning for their own “little bubble” that, as many have pointed out, has dual resonance in the wake of President Trump’s election. Any added political subtext should be taken with a grain of salt, as Dirty
Projectors remains a searingly personal album with the electronic experimentation of Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz and raw vulnerability of Beyoncé’s Lemonade.
Like the latter, Longstreth reaches a place of forgiveness by album’s end, taking a page from Major Lazer on the joyous DAWN collaboration Cool Your Heart and reconciling that “the love we made is the art” on lyrical olive branch
I See You. Coming a week after Ryan Adams’ similarly lovesick but less inventive Prisoner, Dirty
Projectors is a potent reminder that there can be beauty in the breakup. Download: Little Bubble, Ascent Through Clouds, Cool Your Heart