In 2003, primary Dirty Projector Dave Longstreth shocked and awed critics with his debut The Glad Fact, a strange, messy collection of singularly beautiful songs. In 2004, he bewildered fans and critics alike with his challenging orchestral suite Slaves' Graves & Ballads. The new album will astonish again, as Longstreth trades his wabi-sabi for an arsenal of subwoofing sin waves, stoned rhinemaidens, clipshod beats, bone-crushing riffs played by wind orchestras, weird de-tuned guitars, and Wagnerian psychodrama. It is as subtle and flinty a piece of protest music as "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"? but in the end it is a love story, recorded over the course of almost two years in three different states with more than twenty-five people.
Dirty Projectors
The Getty Address
[Western Vinyl; 2005]
Rating: 8.2
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Download it from Emusic
To Dirty Projectors mastermind Dave Longstreth, execution is as important as the music itself. Longstreth started The Getty Address years ago as a Yale student, eventually abandoning the project, dropping out of school, and releasing two other LPs. He's now revisited the work with a new approach, and though one could listen to the album and skim the lyrics without noticing the subtext, The Getty Address is a modern opera about post-9/11 America, the destruction of our natural wilderness, the confrontation between Hernan Cortes and the Aztecs in the early 16th century, and a protagonist named after Don Henley.
Mind you, The Getty Address is compelling without the back story. Where Dirty Projectors' previous albums featured drifting song structures, Getty Address tosses verse-chorus-verse out the window and relies on stuttering, repeated musical themes. Longstreth indulges the classical influences he first explored on last year's Slaves' Graves and Ballads, but the instrumentation (strings, woodwinds, a female choir) is sampled musique concrete-style and infused with electronic R&B beats. This isn't just opera with a little thump for flavor, though-- Longstreth comes at modern R&B just as he does folk and classical, with a deep appreciation and an outsider's flair.
It's a disjointed listen, but that's not a criticism; Longstreth has never made pop records, and this is no exception. When things click, Getty Address features a series of stunning moments: The staccato guitar and cascading beats in "I Will Truck", the impressionistic flutes on "Gilt Gold Scabs", the female vocal solo on the swinging "Tour Along the Potomac", the pleading yet ecstatic falsetto on "Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego". Longsreth's excellent voice is the most accessible point of these compositions, although on this LP he's left out the tape hiss, chirping crickets, and subway-tunnel caterwauling about Orange Crush. Crisp production suits his vocals, and his performances here are more controlled (and with a wider range) than his past work.
Learning the conceit of The Getty Address didn't change my opinion of the album either way. It's a challenging concept, but Longstreth's thorough deconstruction of classical elements gives the colonization theme some precedence. And at the end of the day, it's the music that makes this Dirty Projectors' most ambitious and successful project to date.
-Jason Crock, April 11, 2005
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