record reviews:
Dirty Projectors
New Attitude
(Marriage Records)
When the Dirty Projectors are feeling poppy, they sound like the weirder parts of the Prince catalog let loose in a Missouri saloon with their handlers, a pack of bug-eyed gypsy meth-heads. And on New Attitude, the gentlemen from Brooklyn seem to be feeling poppy.
Head Projector David Longstreth’s great strength lies in ripping all that is pretty or precious away from ornate orchestration and rendering it again an exercise in concentration and differentiation that invites the listener to pay attention and get viscerally involved right on the border between melody and madness.
Even in the more sober and conventionally “beautiful” movements, as in the somber string passages in “Likeness of Uncles,” Longstreth’s multi-tracked ululating vocals maintain the suggestion of incipient doom.
“Two Sheep Asleep”’s hysterical acoustic guitar, banjo, clapping, and spastic digital curlicues altogether get a lot closer to the spirit of old folk field recordings than many artists in recent years have managed to get through much more traditional approaches.
The kids have been saying lately that flute is the new cowbell, and “Two Young Sheeps” seems to support that theory. It also has a hip-shaking beat, a schoolyard / rave whistle, and a vocal call-and-response that is aurally overexposed, as if Longstreth tangled a cheap gymnasium P.A. up in the rest of the Dirty Projectors’ usual wagonload of toys and gadgets. The song has a childlike glee that, like all childlike glee, can be grating to those not participating—surely a clear invitation for the listener to start squalling along.
The EP was perhaps made to be broken into mp3s; not only does each track within itself cover a space of musical terrain best traversed by a bullet train, but they all jaggedly wrench apart from each other in a way that is totally antithetical to some of the DPs’ earlier album-length projects.
New Attitude was originally released in March as a tour-only vinyl novelty EP. Marriage Records has now made it available to us regular folks as well.
— Kate Guillemette
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