Given that the Dirty Projectors is Dave Longstreth doing the homemade handmade
one-man-band thing, it's no surprise that this disc starts off with dirty
drums cut up into a rudimentary loop, draped with one-finger keyboards
to suit the mood. The expectation, then, is that the next 45 minutes
is gonna be not much but the same... and then the opening title-track
song stops after two minutes, and in comes Longstreth's voice. As in
a film that waits a few key scenes before introducing the hero of the
show with a defined, definite introduction, this arrival of his voice
is the start of the album's star turn. Whilst home-recorded four-tracker-type
efforts usually find those boys who dare to sing doing so with so much
breathy diffidence, Longstreth sings like some someone singing around
the house — rolling tape be damned. He hums whilst cutting vegetables,
croons whilst doing the dishes, and flat-out belts it out in the shower,
making lines like "There will not be an email/ There will not be a phone
call" seem profoundly poetic in their prosaic day-to-day ways. His voice
could easily be said to be somewhere between those of Tim and Jeff Buckley,
but where saying such may speak of his being a vocal virtuoso, Longstreth
is more the exuberant amateur. Here, he hits plenty of notes that're,
y'know, off the note, but part of his whole home-recorded shtick is that
this disc is littered with dissonance and disharmony and such, and, in
such, you often get the feeling that Longstreth is working in Tori Kudo
mode, covering up his technical profiency with a cultivated naïveté.
Assembling an array of instruments entirely on his own, he prefers to
fumble together humble arrangements, his collagist approach upping the
idiosyncrasy as his idiosyncratic voice — multi-tracked, doused
in reverb, front and center — leads you into unique artistic worlds
of one man's creation. Whilst there are moments that seem most recent-Radiohead-like
in the way a dense weave of atonal parts is woven together around a raw,
warbling, wailing vocal, Longstreth's influences seem less recent, his
multi-tracked, doused-in-reverb, front-and-center vocals speaking of
influence from Depression-era folk/blues and jazz/folk troubadours. These
influences aren't the kind worn on one's sleeve, though. There, Longstreth
proudly pins his heart, keeping his disparate musical desires clothed
and close to his chest, this finished album-length presentation less
about record collections and more about whole persons. His particular,
peculiar musical persona does have a context though, Longstreth having
spiritual and actual associations with all those wandering K Recs types
like Little Wings and [[[[VVRSSNN]]]] and Microphones — meaning
it's almost from a social circle, no less, in which there's an artistic
dialogue. When it's heard simply on its own, though— as one man-as-island's
missive, almost akin to a message in a bottle — it's hard
to imagine the Dirty Projectors as the work of anything but a reluctant
recluse.
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