Slaves Graves and Ballads

Poly-choral freak-folk? Glitch opera? Experimental chamber pop? Basically, we have diminished chords + bass drums + string quartet + operatic moans + pure idiosyncratic vision = this album. The Dirty Projectors is Dave Longstreth doing whatever the fuck he feels like, which here means working with what he calls “The Orchestral Society for the Preservation of the Orchestra” for the first half of the album (tracks 1-7), then delivering his own, impassioned solo songs for the second half (8-14). This album is for all you fans of reclusive weirdoes with odd voices who pop up every now and again to grace the world with darkly brilliant and dangerous melodies. For fans of Animal Collective, Joanna Newsom, Nancy Sinatra, etc. Play this, I dare you. Recommended: 2, 8, 6, 3, 11, 10, 4, 13

1. Xylophone and spoken word into some wailing.
**2. Brilliant strings and drums; this one gets into my head and won’t leave.
*3. The clarinet wails :his voice cracks once more, again :play track (a haiku)
*4. Remember seeing Fantasia as a kid? What if you’d gotten stabbed in the throat, but still tried to sing along? Huh?
5. I also liked Peter and the Wolf a lot. Slower, tense, dynamics.
*6. Beautiful, like a 30’s movie soundtrack gone awry.
7. Reprise of track 3, instrumental.
*8. The beginning of the softer, solo section. Same sweet moody singing.
9. Quite mellow, old timey.
*10. Even softer lullaby, insect noises. Dark and beautiful.
*11. Halting, uplifting song, very interesting guitar picking.
12. A simpler tune, someone hammers in tent pegs.
*13. Another lullaby, with some horns. Nice.
14. Soft confessional pluckings. Starts a little slow, gets very good by end.
And if you liked this stuff at all, The Dirty Projectors have a new album coming out this year: an opera about Don Henley (of the Eagles) and Aztecs. Sounds hot to me.