If you've only tuned in for parts of Dirty Projectors' decade-long run, it's entirely possible that you've viewed bandleader Dave Longstreth and his ever-evolving band line-up as a gimmick. After all, though Longstreth had been releasing music as Dirty Projectors for years, the band finally inched toward a critical mass in 2007 on an album that reinterpreted Black Flag's Damaged from memory. The album found Longstreth replacing Rollins' gruff bellow with alien, elastic vocals, anchored to the zigs and zags of West African guitar. Two years later, Bitte Orca used a trio of female vocalists-- mainstays Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian and newcomer Haley Dekle-- to bait often abstruse arrangements and hard-to-parse lyrics. When Questlove posted a backstage video of the Projectors performing an unplugged "When the World Comes to an End" after a "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" appearance, internet commentators concurred that people simply shouldn't be able to sing like that. Between the intercalated harmonies, Longstreth's own sometimes-stringent tone, and his counterintuitive approach to guitar, Dirty Projectors occasionally could be reduced into a menagerie of eccentricities-- possible to enjoy, but sometimes difficult to internalize.
Swing Lo Magellan should help rectify that: The band's least ornate batch of songs to date builds upon Longstreth's most direct and identifiable lyrics ever. Which means that Dirty Projectors have upped their emotional and structural accessibility all at once. Culled from a batch of roughly 40 demos, these tunes explore vulnerability and vexation, sweetness and cynicism with more manageable musical complications than ever before. For instance, the gorgeous "Impregnable Question" finds the seam between Heart of Gold-era Neil Young and late-1960s Serge Gainsbourg; it's a love song between Coffman and Longstreth, her coos helping him to soften his voice above a warm acoustic shuffle. Over handclaps and a ragged, wrapping riff on "Dance for You", Longstreth offers one of his most intuitive and immediate hooks. There's gusto and playfulness here, too, from the way Longstreth clears his very-warped throat before launching into the first verse of opener "Offspring Are Blank" to the brilliant decision to record Coffman and Dekle mocking some of Longstreth's most impenetrable lyrics toward the end of the irrepressible "Unto Caesar". When he sings "Down the line/ Dead, the martyrs' morbid poetry," Coffman teasingly answers, "Uhh, that doesn't make any sense, what you just said." You want to be in the room with this band.
There's also a folk-song seriousness at work on some of the standouts, especially the tragic "Just From Chevron". Structured so that Coffman and Dekle play the part of a Greek chorus while Longstreth sings the dying narrator's plight in soliloquy, the song is a fitting one for this year of Woody Guthrie centennial celebrations. Chevron-- or any company, for that matter-- has brainwashed its employee so that, as he lays dying due to their own mechanical failure, he needs his love not to know that he loves her but that his death is worthwhile, because it's part of the company's quest to power the world. A devastating fact in a field of general abstraction, it's as poignant and profound as anything Dirty Projectors have ever released. The title track works a similar mode, with its buttoned-up rhythm section holding steady alongside lyrics about the clutches of conformity and the liberation of self-reflection. "In the grid, aware their position," Longstreth sings, any possible scorn swallowed in genuine worry. "Unconcerned with intuition."
That's not to say that all of these arrangements are exactly intuitive. After all, this is still Dirty Projectors, and this is still an album whose first single, "Gun Has No Trigger", is an unnerved look at the way things might have been and whose rhythm doesn't shift once. The tricky meter that underpins "About to Die" is quintessential Dirty Projectors, as are the two-part harmonies bouncing against Longstreth's young-love paranoia. "Maybe That Was It" even inches toward psychedelic rock. Longstreth's falsetto comes refracted through a web of effects, providing a suitable counter for the Crazy Horse-like stumbling stagger and craggy electric lead. Even the straightforward Dirty Projectors are still a mighty complex unit.
Swing Lo Magellan is a confident step into the spotlight that neither depends upon public expectations nor shies away from them. It's well-made but certainly not over-produced, idiosyncratic and intricate but very rarely obtuse. But as compelling as these tunes and these performances often are, what's most intriguing about Swing Lo Magellan is the way it suggests that, even after a decade, we still don't know everything about Longstreth or his band. If, in the past, he or they sometimes seemed like a freak show, they come toward Earth just enough here to feel like a proper rock band working in service of songs about love and confusion, anxiety and celebration.
In a society of by-the-second news updates and endless information all the time, it's strangely reassuring to feel as if a songwriter who's been endlessly interrogated, analyzed, and publicized is still something of a stranger. Longstreth himself seems to serve as the narrator of "Dance for You", an ebullient account of an odyssey for a grail that exists but has yet to be found. "There is an answer," reckons Longstreth, his voice rising optimistically over film-score strings. "I haven't found it/ But I will keep dancing until I do." This far into a career, that's a good thing not only to hear a songwriter sing but a mantra to hear him create by, too.
