Things you should know about Dave "D-Lo" Longstreth, the singer, visual artist, and multi-instrumentalist behind The Dirty Projectors:
The Yale dropout is (why pull punches?) a nobrow genius, who claims to find similar solaces in the work of Beethoven, Wagner, Zeppelin and Timberlake.
He is obsessed with rendering into song an image that congeals the iconography of Poe, Hitchcock, and McDonalds. That image: a young man defending himself from an army of finches by pelting them with french fries. This daymare haunts Longstreth's (for freak-out fans only) Morning Better Last EP and his current album The Glad Fact, as well as his forthcoming "double EP", Slaves' Graves and Ballads (half of which will feature his ten-piece Orchestral Society for the Preservation of the Orchestra), and his upcoming "glitch opera," The Getty Address.
His (often multi-tracked) vocals are (often wonderfully) way over the top: he belts like a conspicuous olden minstrel who'd be murdered by his knights, croons like a homeless, yankee Morrissey, warbles like an acid-bent Jim James, panics like a bansheefied M. Ward, and even occasionally barks like a castrati Casablancas. These comparisons are cute indie lilypads for us to drink to, but I am still failing to communicate how soothing Longstreth can sound, how raceless, and how sincerely surreal. I could throw more vocal styles at you (Xiu Xiu, Bobby McFerrin, TV on the Radio), but the neighbors and their cops would think we were causing a disturbance.
He wrote much of The Glad Fact in lungbursts, accompanying himself with a fist on the roof of his car. One of the album's showpieces, "My Offwhite Flag", with its deconstructed Toots & The Maytals versus Need New Body vibe, evokes a Lockheed Martin post-kaboom-scape: to this song the listener can picture a West that has been smithereened into archipelagodom, where the human survivors place their faith in po-mo calypso's power to impress the warlord carnival judges.
He doesn't cling to any lo-fi manifesto, telling me in an email Q&A; that championing one aesthetic as somehow offering more texture than another is "like religion, a way of training your gaze to obscure what's in front of you." While he promises that his next project will be 5.1, fuzz-and-buzzheads may savor the Robert Pollard chords of "Naked We Made It" and the underplayed epic solo of "Lit from Below".
He has created some bizarrely tuned and timed Connecticut jazz. "Boredom Is a Product" plays like Owls being led by a drag Nina Simone; the brilliantly strummed "Like Fake Blood in Crisp October" suggests a pre-intermission ballad from Institutionalizing Porgy and Bess. Longstreth coos the Liars-esque line, "That's not a monument/ It's a grave," only to transcend it: "The new feelings will probably be buried here, too."
Let me clarify my earlier reliance on "genius." Longstreth is not necessarily a zeitgeisty and palatable master assimilator (see Bob Dylan). He's another kind of genius, the unhinged, half-formed kind who sometimes overconceives and overexecutes (see Phil Elvrum). D-Lo has, fittingly, toured with several of the experi-mellow bands out of the increasingly mystical K Records compound.
Also be warned: if you grew up in the back of a stationwagon, near a "classic parking lot at the end of time," prepare for a life-changingly deadpan and exultant refrain about those days of plastic passion: no one can swoon "We drank a two-liter of Orange Crush" the way Dave Longstreth does.
