Dirty Projectors – Swing Lo Magellan

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Artist: Dirty Projectors

Album: Swing Lo Magellan

Label: Domino

Year: 2012

Genre: Indie Rock

RIAA Radar Status: SAFE

Encoder: XLD

Sample Rate: 44,1 kHz

Codec: LAME

Avg Bit Rate: 320 kbps

Description / Review:

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When describing Swing Lo Magellan as “an album of songs,” Dirty Projectors leader Dave Longstreth is trying to make a statement, not state the browbeatingly obvious (what else would it be, an album of stock tips?). He also calls it “an album of songwriting,” and that gets closer to the sentiment of what he’s trying to say. Which is nothing to do with the LP’s construction, but its spirit; not how he assembled the songs, but the sincerity and sentimentality with which he did.

If past LPs had hewed towards pieces of avant-garde composition (2005’s The Getty Address), kooky conceptual art (2007’s Rise Above), or some combination thereof (2010’s Björk collaboration Mount Wittenberg Orca), Swing Lo Magellan dares do away with such artifice. For Longstreth, such artifice was armour, and tearing it away has left him vulnerable, exposed, and naked; a man standing alone with a guitar and a song. And, well, carolling female vocalists and taut rhythm-section and a full orchestra, too.

Musically, Swing Lo Magellan is the first Dirty Projectors album in a long while that hasn’t felt like a radical change-up. Instead, initial spins show how close it is to its beloved predecessor, 2009’s Bitte Orca; the wild, poly-genre mania only really turned down a shade, compositionally; there still cascading vocal harmonies (the sprightly “About To Die”) and Led Zeppelinisms (opener “Offspring Are Blank”) and splattering guitar frissons (“Just from Chervon”) and inscrutable lyrics (“I ran across cyanide plains/mind like a prison cell/but feet untethered and sane”). But, emotionally speaking, it’s operating at a distinctly different register.

Impregnable, Irresponsible, Emotional

No moment symbolizes this new sentimentality like “Impregnable Question,” a Beatlesy piano-ballad that is an unabashed love-song. “I need you/and you’re always on my mind,” Longstreth sings; the last five words —intentionally or no— finding resonance with time-worn, tender-hearted tunes by Willie Nelson and Will Oldham; daring to turn his heart loose, to sing about the “side-by-side” life of him and longtime collaborateur/love-interest/Dirty Projector Amber Coffman. “You are my love/and I want you in my life,” the tune closes, its earnestness unbowed, its warmth unprecedented across the past six DP LPs.

Closer “Irresponsible Tune” does have precedence in the band’s lineage, recalling the early, acoustic-strumming warblings of Longstreth solo; the “f**ked-up version of American music” that Vampire Weekend leader Ezra Koenig once dubbed the early Dirty Projectors metier. Here, Longstreth is alone, again, with an acoustic guitar, but singing with the new wrinkle of nascent guilelessness. If “Dance for You” is a jokey, good-natured riff on the touring musician’s performing-monkey existence (set to an easy, handclapping amble), there’s more of a daring in the way the album’s finale dares to make Longstreth, his life, and his work the outright text of an “irresponsible” tune.

If Swing Lo Magellan is an album of songs, “Irresponsible Tune” is a song about songs; about living a life charge with creating them, about the life they have on their own, about how a songwriter’s dreams of change bump up against cold reality (“Will there be peace in the world?/Or will violence always own the truth?”). “Without songs, we’re lost and life is pointless, harsh and long,” Longstreth warbles, like the birds (brown finches?) outside his window; a philosophical sentiment that leads into his own musicophilia.

“In my heart, there is music/in my mind is a song,” he offers, before turning his life into a couplet whose hard, monosyllabic words are the opposite of every cryptic sentiment of his career thus far: “sing all day/record-and-play.” So it is, and, hopefully, so it shall ever be: long may Longstreth dance on, living to sing all day another day.

Track Listing

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[01/12] Offspring Are Blank (4:00)

[02/12] About To Die (3:59)

[03/12] Gun Has No Trigger (3:24)

[04/12] Swing Lo Magellan (2:37)

[05/12] Just From Chervon (4:07)

[06/12] Dance For You (3:23)

[07/12] Maybe That Was It (3:56)

[08/12] Impregnable Question (2:43)

[09/12] See What She Seeing (3:39)

[10/12] The Socialites (3:48)

[11/12] Unto Caesar (3:37)

[12/12] Irresponsible Tune (2:47)

Total number of files: 12

Total size of files: 10 MB

Total playing time: 42:00

Generated: sabato 30 giugno 2012 11:36:14

Created with: #indie.torrents NFO Generator (Mac) v2.3b1