The Quietus

What would indie guitar music sound like if it took on the futuristic production techniques of modern R&B, hip hop and pop music?

It is an intriguing question but one that few guitar acts seem interested in answering - remarkably few, in fact, given the way that R&B and hip hop have dominated contemporary pop music over the last two decades. Arctic Monkeys’ AM borrowed something of the minimal snap of modern hip hop percussion; Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City bore the recognisable pop marks of co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid; and even Coldplay’s most recent album A Head Full of Dreams suggested the band had been paying a lazy eye to what was happening in the charts.

On the whole, though, the critically-acclaimed guitar albums of the last 12 months - Savages, Angel Olsen, Parquet Courts etc - have tended to be fixated on the past, which may explain why they were crowded out at the top of most of the year-end lists by more sonically expansive records from the likes of Frank Ocean, Solange etc.

Dirty Projectors - on this record, at least, pretty much Dave Longstreth and assorted collaborators, including D∆WN RICHARD and Tyondai Braxton - have history here. Back in 2009, a year before Frank Ocean even joined Odd Future, Dirty Projectors produced ‘Stillness is The Move’, a song that skirted the fringes of R&B in a way that predated Arctic Monkeys’ AM and was later covered by Solange. The band’s 2012 album Swing Lo Magellan upped the ante, its 12 tracks run through with danceable drums and electronic effects.

It is an approach that has won DP both octopus-armfuls of bouquets and great stinking buckets of critical filth over the years. In 2009 Mimi Haddon called the band “inept and “sexless” in tQ, the same year NPR’s Will Hermes criticised Dirty Projectors for being “too eager to show off their smarts”. In 2013, meanwhile, Paul T Bradley of LA Weekly expounded his view that “eclecticism is not a substitute for quality” in a piece simply entitled ”The Dirty Projectors are Not Good”.

Such wildly divergent critical opinion is only likely to expand with the release of Dirty Projectors’ self-titled seventh album. While Swing Lo Magellan may have taken cues from modern pop and R&B, it was still notably a guitar album, albeit an adventurous one. Dirty Projectors, by contrast, sees Longstreth dive head-long and gleeful into the musical sandpit of effects, layering and sonic processing that typifies modern pop.

Take album opener ‘Keep Your Name’: it opens with the roughly time-stretched clang of church bells, which cede to moody piano chords and the alien sound of Longstreth’s pitched down voice, a discombobulating album opening akin to the shape-shifting vocal surprise that Frank Ocean pulled on Blonde’s opening track, ‘Nikes’. As ‘Keep Your Name’ progresses, Longstreth is joined by a minimal drum-machine patter, cough syrup synth chords and backing vocals that have been stretched and prodded into a ghostly chorus of support. You can, if you listen closely, hear a lonely guitar at the 1.30 mark. But it feels isolated, a bystander to the central plot.

‘Death Spiral’, which follows, goes even further, producing the most overtly pop moment on an album that is full of them. It is a song that will divide opinion, more ‘Cry Me a River’ than ‘Stillness is The Move’, with Longstreth’s voice channeling its inner Justin Timberlake as it reaches for some impressively high notes. The backing, meanwhile, is pure Timbaland, all echoing bass drum thump, beat box clatter and the sound of impatient robotic fingers drumming on the table, tied to rolling piano, clipped acoustic guitar and mortuary strings. It is a ridiculous song, overblown and extravagant, but brilliantly so in the way it cares not a fig for DP’s guitar roots.

Such futurism alone would be enough to make Dirty Projectors a remarkable release. Rubbing up against this, though, is a highly orchestrated pop sound that harks back to Smile-era Beach Boys or the baroque 60s pop of The Left Banke. That’s to say intricate, layered vocals, strings and left-field instrumentation, like the harp on ‘Little Bubble’, a song that introduces the Beach Boys’ psychedelic barbershop quartet to the robotic burble of Auto-tune.

This mix comes to a head on the stunning ‘Ascent Through Clouds’, seven unlikely minutes of neo-Prog two step (TM) that features vertiginous string arrangements, a lolling mid section that brings to mind Jack Ü’s ‘Where Are Ü Now' and a distorted four four beat that is straight out of a Berlin dungeon. That this all hangs together is tribute to Longstreth’s jigsaw-puzzle-solving skill as a pop arranger.

People who hate Dirty Projectors will find ample grist for their mill here. Dirty Projectors is an album that seems wilfully eclectic, picking from the table of modern pop at greedy will; it ventures into territory generally best left untested by guitar bands from Brooklyn; and it is a “clever” album, constructed in a way that some people will surely see as too knowing or arch.

And yet the strongest argument against this lies in the sheer emotional heft of the songs found on Dirty Projectors. The music here may be cleverly assembled but this never comes at the expense of raw emotion. This is a break-up record and it shows, none more so than on the open-hearted tale of love and separation that is ‘Up in Hudson’, a track that relates Longstreth’s courting of, relationship with and subsequent split from (former?) band mate Amber Coffman over somber Dixieland jazz chords.

Not only are the songs here strong enough to support such extreme sonic fiddling, they seem to demand it. This, Dirty Projectors is saying, is what a break up album sounds like in the adventurous pop landscape of the mid 2010s. This is how a spectrum of effects can enhance the emotional mood rather than mask it; the pitched-down vocals on ‘Keep Your Name’, say, coming across as bruised, broken and confused in both execution and melody.

In such an electric smorgasbord of an album it is inevitable that not everything will pan out. ’Work Together’ is irritating, marrying a messy smudge of electronics to a melody that isn’t one of the album’s best, and the brilliance of D∆WN RICHARD’s vocal on ‘Cool Your Heart’ would benefit from a remix that tones down the musical fussiness several notches. But these are isolated incidents and, even at its worst, Dirty Projectors is an interesting album, one that dares to engage with wonders of the modern pop landscape rather than stick its head in the ground and pray for 1978.

At its best, meanwhile, Dirty Projectors is a masterful release, packed to the hilt with emotion, melody and fascinating sonic quirks, an album that recalls the glitchy soul of Blonde, the drum machine melancholy of Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak and the wide-eyed pop experimentalism of Smile. if you squint a little you could even draw a line to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica in the way Dirty Projectors bins the guitars in favour of bending modern musical trends to its particular will. Dirty Projectors is not quite that good - few records are - but it certainly drives a stake into the ground as to what guitar bands could deliver in 2017 if they would only open their ears and minds up a little.

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It is also, I would suggest, a break up record about break up records, in which the boffinish Longstreth studiously filters the demise of the relationship through a variety of different lenses – musical and lyrical – out of pure intellectual curiousity.

“Complex plans and high ideals but he treats people poorly; is his ceaseless ambitiousness proxy for a void he’s ignoring?” an autotuned Longstreth sings on the nagging electronic throb of ‘Work Together’. And it’s honestly hard to work out what the answer is. Dirty Projectors is a record about a breakup, on which Longstreth says some occasionally quite brutal things about his own behaviour. But certainly there’s little concrete evidence for him being heartbroken, that this record is cathartic for him, as opposed to being an interesting project.

Oddly, it’s still far more relatable than anything 'the band' (here Longstreth plus a vast guestlist that includes Tyondai Braxton and Dawn Richards) has previously done, if only because it is, for once, so apparant what Longstreth is harping on about – Dirty Projectors have made some sublime music, but it's more usual to feel awed than invested. Opener ‘Keep Your Name’ is both the nearest and furthest to a 'classic' breakup song – a pretty, weary croon, presaged by a brief sample of wedding bells (a wedding organ sounds on final track ‘I See You’) and the album’s most mawkish line: “I don’t know why you abandoned me, you were my soul and my partner”. But his voice is harshly twisted and distorted, as if mocking the sentiments that he’s expressing, there is an (ironic?) sample of the “We don’t see eye to eye” line from 2012’s ‘Impregnable Question’, and before too long the mournful, sedate tone has given way to, of all things, a rap segment on which Longstreth gets increasingly incensed, eventually spitting “your heart is saying clothing line, my body is saying Naomi Klein… what I want from art is truth, what you want is fame".

Pretty douchey, right? I mean, yes, but it’s not like Longstreth doesn’t know that, and his songwriting mode changes as soon as we hit the next song, ‘Death Spiral’, a stabbing electro number that dramatises the awful, joyless end to the relationship with a solid amount of self-blame (“I never learned to let you breathe, Condescended relentlessly”).

Then the lengthy album centrepiece ‘Up In Hudson’ provides a sunny look back to the start of the relationship – “The first time ever I saw your face, laid my eyes on you Was the Bowery Ballroom stage, And I knew that I had to get to know you” – even as it’s intercut with the foreshadowing chorus: “Love will burn out Love will just fade away”.

Getting an exact grip on Longstreth’s feelings is difficult, though it certainly seems reasonable to assume that his and Coffman’s breakup was a dragged out, traumatic experience. Is he sad now? Dunno.

There is, inevitably, something slightly disquieting about a man singing about his female ex-partner in withering tones that occasionally carry with them the faintest whiff of emotional abuse: on the downbeat, percussive ‘Winner Takes Nothing’ he sings of his ex – “you’re shining life fifteen of fame” and “As much as I'd like to say I'm grateful for the experience, that we've grown together and bettered each other and built the city with one another, the truth is you'd sell out the waterfront for condos and malls_”.

The repeated inference is that Coffman was shallow and materialistic and Longstreth a sensitive artist, which is kind of a gross cliché to publicly lay on somebody to begin with. And what do we know about the truth behind his breezy put-downs? Maybe Coffman was just concerned about financial stability as the pair headed deeper into their thirties. Certainly her Twitter feed speaks of little more sinister than a passionate support for leftwing causes. And yet to view the record's harshest lines as simple evidence of Longstreth’s douche maleness is to ignore the stew of observations, the descriptions of the good times and the owning up to being a dick, the fact that the album is less concerned with blame than trying to replicate the queasy sense of a relationship on its last, tortured legs. There is the worry Coffman might make some future statement that would problematise things, but for now I feel fairly happy that Longstreth is deliberately trying to paint himself as a bit of a wang.

To what end, though? I’m pretty sure it’s not guilt. A detached interest in his own behaviour? Probably. But also it’s clear from his use of beats and autotune, the namecheck for Kanye, that he’s as much dabbling with the palette of other breakup albums – notably 808s & Heartbreak – as he is in simply letting his pain pour out down the path of least resistance. Compared to say, Blood on the Tracks or perhaps the more closely equivalent Hissing Fauna are You the Destroyer? it is not obviously a record that feels like its creator made it for his mental health – more that he looked at the mess of his life and saw a great new concept. And that is absolutely fine, I think: an acoustic album about how sad he feels would be a much stranger move for Dirty Projectors. The record works not because it feels cynical, but because beneath the obvious lyrical headlines, you can sense Longstreth’s genuine enthusiasm for the new forms he’s exploring so vigorously. The record’s most stunning moment isn’t anything Longstreth says, but the lengthy outro to ‘Up In Hudson’, a thrilling passage of pounding percussion and burning feedback that feels like love of music is its only guiding factor.

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Like most people going through breakups, Dave Longstreth wants you to believe he’s doing just fine. The nine songs on Dirty Projectors delve into his separation from former bandmate and girlfriend Amber Coffman, whose arresting voice over the past decade was as vital to Dirty Projectors’ sound as Longstreth’s own yelps and howls. It’s impossible to ignore the context of the record, largely because Longstreth makes it impossible to forget. He’s quick to admit that “a song isn’t a newspaper” and that Dirty Projectors isn’t entirely autobiographical, even if the album’s narrator sings about writing a tune called “Stillness Is the Move.” Memoiristic or not, he’s found a way to express the lonely anthologizing of events that matter only to you and one other person, couched within a strange, dizzying pop record.

For a band who once felt like an army of mannered Brooklynites and is now ostensibly the solo project of one bearded Longstreth, Dirty Projectors have always brought pop music to their homemade sound. Since his last album, 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan, Longstreth has worked alongside Rihanna, Kanye West, and Solange (who co-wrote this album’s “Cool Your Heart”). But much of Dirty Projectors takes its inspiration from further back, comfort food for someone who may very well be nostalgic for the halcyon days of 2009. The stop-and-start buzz of “Death Spiral” is as delirious and slick as a Futuresex/Lovesounds interlude. “Cool Your Heart,” with its fancy-car music video and massive chorus, is a feel-good R&B trade-off with D∆WN that calls back to the same era of weirdo pop duets as Moby and Gwen Stefani’s “South Side.” The music on Dirty Projectors sounds like the propulsive, hyper-curated nostalgia you put on to forget your heartbreak.

Instead, Longstreth uses it to help reveal what hurts. In the stunning “Little Bubble,” he lies around the house, cursing his “dumb and meaningless” dreams and longing for death. In “Winner Take Nothing,” he reflects on a broken relationship, unable to find anything positive to say in its wake. “This has turned me against myself,” he sings, “In losing you, I lost myself.” For anyone wondering what Kanye song he was listening to on the Taconic Parkway in “Up in Hudson,” my money’s on “Blame Game,” when Kanye fragments his vocals to represent the myriad demons haunting him at once. Longstreth incorporates a similar tactic throughout the album, pitch-shifting his voice, distorting and layering it to mimic the hocketing sound that’s long defined his songwriting. But what once felt whimsical and communal now sounds suffocating and paranoid. Longstreth is trying to escape himself.

“Maybe love is a competition that makes us raise the bar/We better ourselves,” he sings on “Work Together,” a selfish way to define a relationship but a viewpoint that seems to have inspired a sense of confidence. Using this freedom to find new collaborators like Solange and Tyondai Braxton, Longstreth has refined and upgraded himself, becoming bolder in the process. In fact, Dirty Projectors, in its own warped way, might be the sharpest, tightest record he’s made yet. Like Joni Mitchell’s epic “Paprika Plains,” which layered a sweeping string arrangement over an autobiographical improv piano piece, Dirty Projectors’ ornate arrangements can’t hide the fact that these songs are as direct and unguarded as Longstreth allows himself to get.

The fatal flaw in this work, the same one that’s haunted every Dirty Projectors album from the elaborate Black Flag rewrites of Rise Above to the faux-folksy love songs of Swing Lo Magellan, is the feeling of conceptual overload. But overthinking is a core part of Longstreth’s aesthetic and here it balances the drag of a post-breakup bloodletting, when even the album's title feels, to say the least, confrontational. You can hear Longstreth analyzing his thoughts in real time throughout these songs, sometimes finding a sense of resolution in the process. On the closing track, “I See You,” he reaches for a happy ending in the most characteristic song on the whole album—it’s the only thing here that wouldn’t sound out of place on Bitte Orca. But the lyrics hint at a transformation. “The projection has faded away,” he sings right after landing on a line that’s extremely corny, slightly condescending, and maybe even romantic: “I believe that the love we made is the art,” he sings sternly. He knows it’s not perfect, but for now, it’s the best he’s got.

Tiny Mix Tapes 50

Dirty Projectors
Dirty Projectors

[Domino; 2017]

Rating: 2.5/5