Dirty Projectors, The: The Getty Address
ALBUM DESCRIPTION
The Getty Address is an epic glitch-opera about a mythical character named Don Henley. Using a women's choir, sub-woofing sin waves, clipshod beats, a wind orchestra, and detuned guitars, The Getty Address guides the listener through a psychodramatic love story, meditating on the ideas of the wilderness inside us all and the meaning of America once the 'Manifest Destiny' imperative has expired completely. The Getty Address is as subtle and flinty a piece of protest music as "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"?but in the end it is a love story.
Dirty Projectors, The: Slaves' Graves and Ballads
ALBUM DESCRIPTION
Slaves' Graves and Ballads presents classical and pop music's bodies-entwined, souls-commingled wedding, with extended families abiding. Their child doesn't have one white eye and one Asian one; rather, he sees differently. The lyrics further develop Longstreth's shrubs-at-the-edge-of-the-lot imagery from last year's debut The Glad Fact, marking how the landscaping in large parking lots makes us feel different about ourselves. Tricked-out Hondas, subwoofers, sunsets, woodchips, chiropractors: all these pieces of the American strip coalesce in a vivid meditation on the technology that domesticates and the instinct that resists domestication. What Slaves' Graves explores in a collective way, the Ballads explore in a personal, individual way. Here, the MO is personal heartbreak and romantic yearning. Uniting both is the feeling that what's most true is hard to see because it is unbearably simple. In this way, Slaves' Graves and Ballads belong to each other.
Dirty Projectors, The: The Glad Fact
ALBUM DESCRIPTION
The Dirty Projectors? debut album, The Glad Fact, dwells in the sorts of emotional ambiguities and contradictions that have always tortured the sensitive ones. Each song offers a new melody that seems to have been sent from some erratic and beautiful netherworld. The music is many things at once: sophisticated and heartfelt, tender and aggressive, pleasing and miserly in its refusal to please. Longstreth's songs possess a will to surprise and deceive that constantly defies our expectation of musical -- and emotional -- resolution. The songs' brokenness is their resolution, and their most beautiful part.