Dirty Projectors
I couldn’t explain what I meant about “fucked-up American music” six years ago and I’m not that interested in trying to explain it now. I just think it’s fitting to describe DPz with a phrase that’s been exploited by the worst of the worst and the corniest of the corniest, but has always had the potential to mean something rad: Uniquely American.
– Ezra Koenig (of Vampire Weekend)
Selected Press
There’s a world of cross-references in Dirty Projector’s music: stuttering modal riffs from Mali, the meandering melodies of opera or modern music theater, pygmy antiphonal vocals, Captain Beefheart, Zimbabwean and Congolese rock, King Crimson, Talking Heads, Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks.
[Longstreth] is (why pull punches?) a nobrow genius, who claims to find similar solaces in the work of Beethoven, Wagner, Zeppelin and Timberlake.
completely strange and oddly familiar at the same time
This is scary, evocative music, like an Alan Lomax field recording of a dusty, punk troubadour from the imaginary past; Kid A covered under 80 years of dust and gloom, only exchange the robots and clones for forests and abandoned farmhouses. On The Glad Fact, Dave Longstreth is making his own fucked-up version of American music.