First off, if you haven't set aside your skepticism about Dirty Projectors and at least tried listening to Swing Lo Magellan, you should. Coming from a band that has been at times irritatingly proud of their own complexity, it's a refreshingly basic album. Of course, basic is a relative term. Magellan is still dense and fidgety, and Dave Longstreth still seems like a writer incapable of getting to the end of a song without proving that he and his bandmates are, in some capacity, beyond human. His tricks, though, are fewer and further between. Whether it's a product of age, epiphany, or just general exhaustion, I don't know, but it turns out that the less hysterically he and his band try to prove how talented they are, the more obvious their talent becomes.
Take a recent tweet he wrote about "While You're Here", one of three new songs on the four-track About to Die EP: "Hey, here's a song I wrote on the day of [late TV on the Radio bassist] Gerard Smith's wake in BK 2 summers ago. This song is for him. Miss u Gerry!" The song itself is two minutes long, just Longstreth's voice and a string section. His knotty, chromatic sense of harmony is still there, and his voice-- that insistent animal yip-- is too. But as the strings resolve from dissonance to consonance, the point of the song is made unavoidably clear: "While you are here you are alive."
This is an easy, comforting, life-affirming statement that anyone can relate to. It's also the kind of statement Longstreth has spent 10 years avoiding. In a lot of ways, musical complexity-- and the high-minded shock value associated with it-- has been his crutch. At times, I have felt like the intended response to his music is to just say "holy shit" repeatedly until something else comes on, since it is difficult to think or feel anything when saying "holy shit" repeatedly. "The hardest thing is to do something simple," he told us in an interview this year. For Longstreth, this seems true. It's not that the music Dirty Projectors are making now is always simple, but when it is, it treats simplicity as a sign of confidence rather than lack of ideas.
The two other new songs that fill out the EP-- "Here Til It Says I'm Not" and "Simple Request"-- sound like testing grounds for ideas that show up more substantively on Magellan. Handclaps, chiming folk-rock guitar, big, tumbling breaks ripped from Led Zeppelin: These are what anchor songs like "Impregnable Question", "Offspring Are Blank", and "Swing Lo Magellan".
Listening to About to Die, the amount of effort Dirty Projectors put into Magellan only becomes more obvious. (In a way, this is almost a bad thing: The amount of effort they put into their albums is obvious already.) You can trust someone as bright, fussy and single-minded as Longstreth to know what belonged on it and what didn't. Still, fans will probably want to hear it. Fans will want to hear almost anything by a band so rare. Over the past few years they've gone from being a willful curiosity to collaborations with Björk and David Byrne, performances on late-night television, profiles in the New York Times, and endorsements from Jay-Z. This is a cherry on a cupcake. Grant them the happy little excess; they're too serious to ask for it.
