Dave Longstreth and his Dirty Projectors are best known as purveyors of fussy, technically demanding art-pop: songs that leap between genres and time signatures, riffs and vocal arrangements that slice and pirouette around each other, verses in which “unimpressed” and “Archimedes Palimpsest” are rhymed with a wink and a grin. It’s amusing, then, that the Projectors are at their friendliest and most engaging when they strip Longstreth’s compositions down, tapping into the loose, raw energy that comes with playing live or working fast.
If 2009’s towering Bitte Orca remains the band’s masterpiece, follow-up Swing Lo Magellan is their easiest album to love, in large part because its quirks—the shaggy handclaps on “Dance for You,” the giggled backing vocals on “Unto Caesar”—puncture the illusion of perfection. You’re compelled to remember that humans had to come together in a room to make this music, which in turn makes their virtuosity all the more thrilling.
That’s the appeal of Sing the Melody, a new live-in-studio album released unceremoniously last week as part of Domino’s Documents series. Last November, near the tail end of months spent touring, the Projectors went into Manhattan’s Power Station to play highlights from their gleeful full-band comeback Lamp Lit Prose and a few gems from their back catalog. None of these songs are radically reinvented, but at a minimum they’re rendered with an impressive urgency. “That’s a Lifestyle” is a good example: It may have already been the most electric, familiar cut on Lamp Lit Prose, but it’s enlivened here by sharper, earthier harmonies from the trio of Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, and Kristin Slipp.
Other songs benefit from addition by subtraction; trimming their more frivolous elements for a live lineup has granted them new clarity and focus. Opener “Right Now” loses a programmed beat, piano part, and vocal manipulation, and its skronking horns are replaced with crisp chords. The final product is a pure and galvanizing call to action, one that would’ve fit in nicely alongside the more reflective material on Swing Lo Magellan. It isn’t the only song to find a more natural home within the Projectors’ larger discography here: Longstreth & co. rip up the floorboards of the bubbly Off the Wall homage “I Feel Energy,” revealing the sort of riffs and cool, clean space heard all the way back on Rise Above.
Most of Sing the Melody’s second half is devoted to older oddities, including a rendition of Dirty Projectors highlight “Cool Your Heart” that’s remarkably faithful to the glitchy, cluttered studio version. Tenured fans who remember how weird and thrilling it felt to see Longstreth pop up with a writing credit on a hit for Kanye West, Rihanna, and Paul McCartney will surely enjoy hearing him repatriate the bridge of “FourFiveSeconds,” and the 2009 David Byrne collaboration “Knotty Pine” retains its punchy, brainy energy. Where the cuts on the album’s first half threaten the supremacy of their “official” counterparts, these ones are enjoyable but ultimately inessential.
“Enjoyable but ultimately inessential” doubles as a frank assessment of Dirty Projectors’ current place in the world around them. The band has felt at odds with the prevailing mood in recent years, for reasons both musical—even after tasting major pop success, Longstreth has continued to let his freak flag fly—and cultural; this isn’t the most hospitable climate, in relative terms, for exacting auteurs. Sing the Melody makes a good argument for the Projectors’ continued relevance by shifting the emphasis from Longstreth’s creative leadership to the band’s power as a collective. In that way, it recalls Bon Iver’s i,i, another album that crackles with interpersonal energy. Both releases encourage you to think of the men at their center as reliant on the communities that bring their ideas to life.
