Dirty Projectors - Dirty Projectors

Rating:

A look to the future.

Love is fucking hard. Dave Longstreth, Dirty Projectors’ founding and sole member, understands this better than most.

“I don’t know why you abandoned me / You were my soul and my partner,” Longstreth laments in the record’s opening seconds. The joyous original soundtrack for La La Land, this is not.

A nasty break-up with former partner and fellow Projector, Amber Coffman, has been rumoured (but unconfirmed) ever since ‘Keep Your Name’, a nuclear bomb of a break-up song, dropped in September 2016. What follows is an album, Dirty Projectors’ eighth, of invention, reflection, gorgeous instrumentation and surprises.

Almost immediately, you’re introduced to the record’s revelation: Longstreth’s voice. It’s chopped up. Its pitch is stretched high and low. Its pace is at times super-charged, at times flung into slow-motion. It’s almost always isolated. Apart from a surprise Solange feature – yes, that Solange – on ‘Cool Your Heart’, which Dave and Solange wrote together between sessions for Solange’s magnificent ‘A Seat At The Table’, Longstreth’s anguish and point of view ("I built my life around your love," he sings on ‘Winner Take Nothing’) dominate the record.