When watching Dirty Projectors perform in Manchester a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by how sweetly awkward it must be to be in Amber Coffman's position. Singing the love-struck lyrics that David Longstreth had written about her, and their relationship, Coffman looked bashful and eye-rolling in the way you only can when someone's saying something genuinely kind about you in public-- but with the added pressure of having to sing the flattering words herself. Romance with a band member is always going to cause compromises, and the break-up of Dark Dark Dark's Nona Marie Invie and Marshall LaCount in the middle of touring their last album, 2010's Wild Go, provoked a question in the title of their third that looks a lot like an ultimatum: Who Needs Who?
The title of the Minneapolis band's new full-length is curious, given that Invie and LaCount's decision to keep the band together implies a mutual dependence, at least creatively. What ensues in part is a rebalancing of the two founding members' roles. On Wild Go, LaCount's banjo playing was prominent, and he sang a little, but the focus on Who Needs Who is predominantly on Invie: her voice, her piano playing, whether romantic, baroque, or angling for a part on the "Treme" score, and most pertinent of all, what appears to be her take on affairs. While Invie never pleads for sympathy or preferential understanding at his expensive, it's hard not to think of how awkward Who Needs Who must have been to make; the result paints a picture of LaCount sitting in the gallery while Invie holds court in the dock. Fortunately for them, a five-month hiatus between the end of one tour and the recording of this album allowed for a clarity of mind and clearing of grudges, with the decision to rehearse and record in New Orleans potentially lending a little perspective (and musical patronage).
While Invie's lyrics are less beholden to imagery and metaphor than they were on Wild Go, the fact that she's staring at LaCount when singing these songs means that she inevitably focuses on what's no longer there between them, despite his physical presence. On the opening title track, which feels like "Fairytale of New York" reinterpreted as a jazz club lament, it's "the memory of trust"; on the elegant piano chime of "Patsy Cline", Invie describes "an old photograph that I don't even have," and admits, "I think of it now," so many memories and actualities removed from the original moment that it captured. "Tell Me" longs to "live in the time when you cherished me," falling gorgeously between the sound of Beach House and the late Laura Nyro.
The tone of Invie's voice and knottiness of her piano playing bring to mind early Fiona Apple, though what's lacking in that regard is Apple's lyrical bite. Until the final three songs of this 10-track collection, Invie's primary shade is regret steeped in sadness, until she unexpectedly and slightly awkwardly pivots into a bitterer groove. What pushes her lyrics beyond the realm of wallowing is how plain affecting a storyteller she can be, buoyed by the cinematic resonance of the slimmed-down band. You'd never catch Apple singing, "I would never ask about other nights/ Only a fool would spoil it all," as Invie does on "How it Went Down", but the way she gets dressed up for the ceremony of giving a particular moment another chance-- "So take your time/ 'Cause taking it here means taking me home"-- and how the sadness has aged her while the fellow protagonist has remained young, is tremendously sad, and made more so by how the band sound like Dirty Three attempting a lullaby. The song that follows it, "It's a Secret", invites someone to "press your ear to my chest" in order to uncover the ineffable truth that makes Invie the way she is, hidden to her and torturous for it, as LaCount loops his clarinet into a baroque dissonance.
These unusual musical flairs pop up all over Who Needs Who, from polka to French chanson, Baltic billows to vaudevillian drama, but unlike with say, Beirut, the style never becomes the substance. Likewise, the drama behind the album's making doesn't overwhelm the music (even though a little more tension might behoove the lyrics), and if anything, it's likely steeled the band against future calamity. LaCount might wince a little when Invie sings, "I'll never get tired of singing these songs" on the gently defiant, cabaret-ish "Meet in the Dark", but few others will.
