★★★★
The melodic brilliance of Dirty Projectors has never been in question – it's the ridiculously overused vocal harmonies that seemed to be present in every single track on 2009's Bitte Orca that were just too much to handle (never mind the fact that they have released seven previous albums).
So thank goodness Swing Lo Magellan has come along to usher in a new era of – oh wait, what's this on the second track? Ugh, that damned harmonizing again!
In all seriousness, it's quite obvious that frontman David Longstreth is a smart enough music man to know that you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to this sort of thing. Changing the formula? Yeah, that makes sense. But doing away with his one-trick-pony-ness would be doing himself a complete disservice.
It's obvious with tracks like "Offspring Are Blank" and "The Gun Has No Trigger" that Longstreth is changing gears, but not doing away with his bread and butter entirely. These tracks in particular are much edgier – much more rock n' roll than what we're used to from Dirty Projectors. And the title track has a softness to it that caught me off-guard as well.
It's really just quite refreshing to hear versatility from what I was thinking would be the same ol' same ol' from this band of New Englandites, especially considering they've been doing this for a decade now.
—ADAM O'CONNOR
Worth a Listen: "Offspring Are Blank" and "The Socialites"
© 2013
Real Detroit Weekly, LLC | 615 S. Washington Ave (2nd Floor), Royal Oak, MI 48067
| 
Website powered by Foundation
