David Longstreth — Song of the Earth (Nonesuch/New Amsterdam)
Photo by Marcus Maddox
When is something a band album and when is it a “solo album?” For Song of the Earth, David Longstreth receives top billing but is joined by his usual outfit Dirty Projectors as part of a significant group of collaborators: s t a r g a z e, André de Ridder, Phil Elverum, Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, and Portraits of Tracy. Musical and textual reference points are similarly far flung, encompassing the composers Gustav Mahler and Olivier Messiaen and journalist David Wallace-Wells’ writings.
The title of Mahler’s late work Das Lied von die Erde (“The Song of the Earth”) is a clear nod to late romanticism. Longstreth’s songs are more compact than most Mahler. “Bank On,” the longest on the album, a mini-epic six minutes, with many others clocking in around the two and three minutes mark. There are also minute-long miniatures, such as “Same River Twice” and “Appetite,” that have time to create an ambience before quickly departing. Romanticism presents as a surface element among a number of disparate musical layers.
Dirty Projectors has long reveled in the jubilantly po-mo, abetted by recording technology to mix mercurial shifts of manner. On previous outings, the quality of Longstreth’s songwriting has sometimes been subsumed by the jump cut quality of its presentation. He doesn’t dispose of this practice on Song of the Earth, but the plethora of classical instruments at his disposal are often deployed in arrangements with a deliberate sense of solidity. “Gimme Earth” combines orchestra, rock instruments, and puckish singing. A folksy verse is contrasted by a prog chorus, interludes filled with upward string arpeggiated flourishes, and a portentous brass fanfare as its climax. The overlapped vocals on “More Mania,” which might have engendered hazier production on a Dirty Projectors release, here are given minimal seasoning, the better to blend with stargaze.
Although Song of the Earth is called a “song cycle,” is this entirely accurate? The term song cycle often implies consolidation, one composer’s group of settings by a single poet. Song of the Earth is instead a work of assemblage, juxtaposition and accrual. If adopting the designation helps Longstreth to write such compelling music, long live the “song cycle.”
"Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One"—a word-for-word setting of paragraph one of David Wallace-Wells' 2019 bestselling book The Uninhabitable Earth, from David Longstreth's upcoming album, Song of the Earth—is out now.
The video, shot by Jake Longstreth, features drone footage of Lake Tulare in California, which dried up from agricultural irrigation but re-emerges periodically from excessive rain or snowmelt.
Björk before to sing with Dirty Projectors at Housing Works Bookstore hosts “Live From Home”, New York, United States, May 8 2009.
Björk antes de cantar con Dirty Projectors en Housing Works Bookstore para “Live From Home”, Nueva York, Estados Unidos, 8 de Mayo, 2009.
bands that start as a group and then only have one original member left...it still feels weird to refer to brendon urie as panic at the disco or david longstreth as the dirty projectors or billy corgan as the smashing pumpkins...
