Dirty Projectors

Your wife is otm

big fan of his voice. marmite stuff though, obviously. i enjoy the shameless abandon with which he exposes it on the early stuff.

Saw them tonight and was kind of let down. Longstreth seems a bit creatively spent, like he’s just coasting on the past. New band is serviceable but not very exciting.

They’re touring? Totally forgot about new record & the (really catchy & good imo) single. That’s a drag. He seemed bored?

It was a festival in NYC so not sure they’re touring. I mean he had some good presence I just felt like the band was trying to recreate past sounds and playing the hits. Nothing was really done in an interesting new way.

Yeah I can see that, the single kinda made me think Bitte Orca 2 (not that I minded, though I liked the s/t).

yeah he had two new female singers that seem like they were very much hired specifically because they could do the Angel and Amber parts, and I find it kind of boring to just recreate that sound (even on the old material) rather than just do something new with it

yeah that blows. so vegas / state fair

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9__9oOkq2c

really enjoying the new record. those two tracks they had released before had really wormed their way into my head. feels like he took some of the good stuff from the s/t record (brass arrangements and interesting percussion) and left behind the painful lyrics

Loving this album so much

I love the new live show. Dave is more charismatic than I've ever seen him, all the new songs are amazing, the band is amazing, I was floored. My only two criticisms were "this is not the best use of the singer of Ava Luna's time because her own band is easily as good as this" and the fact that they played "Keep Your Name"

extremely otm about ava luna. kinda looking forward to checking this out now though

It doesn't make up for the ugliness on the last one, but I do like that it kinda seems from the start that he realized he has kinda been an asshole lately:

I don't know how I'm going to be a better man
I don't know how I'm going to reach the Promised Land
I don't know how I'm going to get you to take my hand
But I'm going to try and I know when

Now (now)
Right now (now)
Right now (now)
Right now (now)
Right now, now (now)
Right now, now (now)
Right now, now (now)
Right now

Yeah it was really weird and great to see Dave having fun and looking like a real frontman

It's interesting, at all times I have an at-arms-length approach to songwriting and producing, deliberately, and I even play it up, and somewhat cheekily refer to people I work with as "clients", and the music we make as "product", which seems like I might be trying to be demeaning, but it's actually, literally me-trying-to-disconnect this inherently dangerous idea that creativity is linked somehow to "self-expression"-- that is, that the songs that one sings and/or writes are done so out of necessity, instead of out of intentionality. You don't have to write a shitty song about your ex-lover and to claim that there is some kind of therapeutic need for that song to exist is false. You have a job and that job is to create useable sonic material, not to use a "tortured artist" model to be shady to your exes.

Sorry lol I just woke up

I really like the new line-up and I really was upset about that last album

A song doesn't need to be 'about' something, a song IS something.

i'm pleasantly surprised by how good this is, he's playing to his strengths again and most importantly not coming across as a total asshole the entire time

Xpost I mean some of us do write shitty songs about our ex lovers and it is genuinely therapeutic but we don't have to release them.

This is deer

I think I meant some general term of positivity but I'm a few beers in shrug

it's 3 in the afternoon

not everywhere

i know i know...

Shouldn’t be surprised at lack of press/enthusiasm/hype for a new DP album but I am. Boy that s/t really did a number on their brand for lack of a better word

And I know he got a lot of bad press for it but damn Longstreth should be thanking his lucky stars every day that it didn’t come out after October 2017

this is really great. enjoying the absence of uncomfortable lyrics.

I think this might be his best album, it feels so summery and pop, and I love the brass arrangements. I really was not expecting this at all, it's such a turnaround from the last one

even ignoring the ugly lyrics, the last album was a fairly tuneless mess - I'd only really keep Little Bubble and Cool Your Heart from it

Up in Hudson was great, too. Keep Your Name also gets stuck in my head a lot still.

Keep forgetting to bump this thread and say that I think Lamp Lit Prose is fucking great and easily the best thing they've ever done besides Bitte Orca. The perfect move to make after the 2017 s/t.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBpL1t8IK0E

I Feel Energy is the standout for me but I really love the whole thing, kinda surprised by the negative reception it's been getting elsewhere

kinda surprised by the negative reception it's been getting elsewhere

While I have read one or two extremely negative reviews for it, it seems like it's generally getting 4/5 off most people: http://www.metacritic.com/music/lamp-lit-prose/dirty-projectors

Maybe some negativity (or rather, indifference) toward it has to do with either a latent reaction to the s/t record or the general peak-2009-ness of DPs

Been listening to it a lot myself and finding it surprising how home-made it sounds, by which I mean that it's largely acoustic guitar/drums right at the centre of the songs and it feels like a lineage (in a recording/production sense) back to the really early DPs records is evident. Was surprised to see in the track credits that Dave is basically playing absolutely everything on the tracks.

Love this album to death; too many standout tracks to list. My only complaint is that "Zombie Conqueror" --> "Blue Bird" can feel like a bit of a slog if I'm not in the right mood... I don't know whether those two actually repeat their hooks any more often than e.g. "I Feel Energy" or "I Found It In U" or "Right Now", but they *feel* more repetitive.

Oh yeah, and some of the lyrics on "Break-Thru" are a bit cringey (but I like Dave even when he's cringey, he seems to come by it honestly).

While there are moments here that remind me of Prince (esp. the squeaky-clean funk guitar, falsetto wailing, & vocal harmonies of "I Feel Energy"), I played the album for my father & he made the much more apt comparison to Squeeze

I got super into Ava Luna thanks to a tiny mention on this thread. They're playing the UK next week but seem to have almost zero profile here (Manchester date just been cancelled and changed to Cardiff - £6.50 a ticket!). Wish there was a thread for them but I don't really have the ILM juice or a ton of insights to offer. Except to say that, if I had created Ice Level (the music + the video), I'd expect the world to be fundamentally altered within 24hrs of uploading it to YouTube, not just 83k views in six years.

ava luna rules

Ava Luna are one of the best bands imo

They've never got any play or promotion in Europe whatsoever.

been really into "lamp lit prose" recently, such a tight, breezy return to form

break-thru is cool

whole album is cool, i agree with k3vin k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHGYtIqLig

New video from new album with new band (i.e. Lamp Lit Prose touring group). Maia Friedman as lead vocalist and co-lyricist.

P chill and it is growing on me.

That's a nice song. I really loved Bitte Orca and Swing Lo Magellan, but didn't like it when he started changing it up and acting like a creep. Should I revisit?

Lamp Lit Prose was a lot less creepy and very good

yeah the s/t was not very good but lamp lit prose is maybe my favourite dp album

i would characterise the s/t as more jerk than creep

lamp lit prose was recorded all by dave with guest vocalists added. the new record i think is recorded with the band put together to tour lamp lit prose

hadnt realised that overlord was from an EP that came out in March. it's good! there's also a related playlist on Spotify full of jams that they put up w Arthur Russell, 70s Dylan, judee sill etc

there's another EP on its way, this is the single from it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtAcgEtY_CM

with three other EPs also set for release this year. the gimmick is a different band member sings lead on each, except the last which will have everyone

The Windows Open playlist is a real treat.

I had a big hunch they were gonna do EPs with each of the singers taking the lead a month ago, especially after Windows Open was all Maya and it came from a such as it was derived from that Portland indie-folk root of the DPs catalogue

I hope they do a bananas orchestral EP amongst the later releases too

3rd EP out today. really into these

I love this song so much
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyU5dHmmFmE