Like Pavlov’s dogs, the listening public has been trained to respond to piano ballads as the sine qua non of heartfelt authenticity. Machines, though, can be kaleidoscopic conveyors of emotion. Witness Björk’s Vulnicura, an analogue/digital hybrid of untrammelled pain, or the proliferation of suffering digital dudes, best exemplified by Kanye’s 808s and Heartbreak and much James Blake.
Enter Dirty Projectors, longtime dwellers on the cusp where twitchy hipster modishness and post-classical composition meet at R&B. A couple of years ago, main man David Longstreth (extracurricular credits: David Byrne, Solange, Joanna Newsom, Bombino, Kanye) and his erstwhile Dirty Projectors foil, Amber Coffman, broke up. The fallout cascades spectacularly all over this record, both in words – many of them pained and harsh – and as digital shrapnel. These nine tunes come strafed with audacious noises (squeaky toys, found sound) and elegant playfulness (witness Work Together’s sour Middle Eastern fantasia). There is dissonance, yes, but Longstreth is far too ninja-level to merely turn his guitar amps up into a sulk of post-breakup feedback. Instead, Dirty Projectors takes the breakup album – as sonically redefined by Beyoncé – and runs with it.
Opening with Longstreth’s vocal pitch-shifted down, the breathtaking Keep Your Name swings wildly between devastation and viciousness as machines stutter and skid. “What I want from art is truth, what you want is fame,” Longstreth sings. The zings get more granular. “Your heart is saying clothing line,” he raps, “My body said Naomi Klein, No Logo…” All the while, a curdled sample of Dirty Projectors’ 2012 track Impregnable Question loops miserably beneath: “We don’t see eye to eye.” It is both soap opera and sound installation, and quite jaw-dropping.
The elegant hyper-modernity of Death Spiral (“tailspin, nosedive, race to the bottom”) also sees the end of love as an R&B plane crash. Warm and pretty, Up in Hudson recounts how Longstreth met Coffman. It opens with digital doo-wop polyphony and liberally quotes Ewan MacColl’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face as beats jump around like popcorn.
Longstreth’s dizzying, attention-deficit sophistication has probably locked some potential fans out previously. The Auto-Tune here might faze a few more, and this self-titled album (he pointedly kept the name) only compounds the impression of a higher-level operator who doesn’t suffer musical fools. But for the first time, Longstreth seems all too human, acknowledging failings and opening his inner landscape outwards. Little Bubble may describe the cosiness of a twosome, but we all know now that all kinds of bubbles – of privilege, of social media feeds – can be such false comforts.
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