The new Dirty Projectors album is a cycle of songs about climate change. ‘Song of the Earth’ is not a pop album, but a classic style work designed to be touched in concert. The orchestra based in Berlin Stargaze accompanies Dirty Projectors in this journey of 24 pieces that mimet with nature. Longstreth says that the proposal of ‘Song of the Earth’ is to offer a “landscape music, music that looks like the natural world.”
In the landscape of ‘Song of the Earth’ the Voices of Dave and those of his companions in Dirty Projectors, Maria Friedman, Felicia Douglass and Kirstin Slipp live together, always so crystalline; With an orchestral corpus that includes ropes, flutes, winds, metals and percussions of all kinds. Music and lyrics sometimes paint an idyllic world and, others, threatening because of global warming. Although peace reigns in the album, sometimes too much.
In ‘Song of the Earth’, Longstreth goes from bathing in the “summer light”, to wake up in the dark. Brooklyn’s musician began writing the album in 2020, during California’s fires, after getting up one morning and observing the sky covered with smoke. Dave and his wife, Teresa Eggers, then three months pregnant, decided to flee – in an empty plane, it was pandemia – to Juanneau, Alaska, where the landscape was very different: pure living nature. Birds and trees everywhere.
Despite the urgency of the matter, ‘Song of the Earth’ is an elusive job, because the letters sometimes choose vague and fragmented forms, and compositions can take short and ephemeral forms. His intention is not to “arouse” an awareness about climate change -longstreth would never do something so obvious- but to connect to the audience with the beauty of nature without misleading it of the threats that stalk. The songs melt with each other deliberately and rest quietly in the vibrant instrumentation without highlighting some above others. Dirty Projectors is one more element within the orchestra. However, the approach can be passed as an academicist and, although (almost) each separate piece has something to offer, together the listening can be tedious and exhausting, such as spending too much time watching the field.
The main influence of ‘Song of the Earth’ is ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, a work by Gustav Mahler of 1908 from which he directly takes his title, but the arrangements also issue echoes of the work of Igor Stravinsky or ‘Quatuor Pour Pour the end du temps’ (1931) by Olivier Messiaen, because Longstreth has declared that this is his favorite disc. This academic base converts ‘Song of the Earth’ into an elegant, fine and intriguing work in its complexity, but also emotionally cold and distant. Stoic. The mood of the entire concert is contemplative, but that contemplation becomes a time after a while.
There is something ironic to write an album about climate change and that the approach is practically inaccessible. Some songs, such as the precisely arranged ‘Circled in Purple’, which speaks of gray and orange skies, work thanks to the drama of the orchestral accompaniment. Others, such as ‘Oppostable Thumb’, manage to encourage the pulse with their jumping percussions and dynamic accompaniment. Throughout the album, the game between voices and instruments is constant and no song is the same closely observed. The harmonic, instrumental and texture wealth of ‘Song of the Earth’ is his best facet.
Although a “song cycle” must be analyzed together, some clues of ‘Song of the Earth’ better guide work than others. ‘Gimme Breead’ is the most achieved composition, passing from the baroque to psychedelic rock, although his letter “I need bread to make me a snack” does not have much crumb, ironically; and get to ‘Bank on’ many clues later means to meet that first song, how to get home. Some compositions are pretty but brief, such as ‘Our Green Darden’ or that piece covered with flutes that is ‘Armforos of Flowers’, and others remember the Dirty Projectors of the past: the first part of ‘Bank on’ asks for the voice of Solange Knowles, and ‘Blue of Dreaming’ is a beautiful nana that Longstreth wrote for his son before he would even know if he would even
But ‘Song of the Earth’, as we say, is long, and not all the material contained in this work is equally cozy. The first advance, ‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One’, exposes the theme of ‘Song of the Earth’ literally adapting to music the first paragraph of ‘The Inhospitable planet’, but I don’t know what context can you feel like someone listening to this song. The text and music union sounds forced and does not work. Other compositions seem outlined: ‘Same River Twice’ offers little more than a letter that repeats the same phrase over and over again and it is difficult not to imagine Longstreth bored of himself recording ‘Spiderweb AT Water’s Edge’, where on a taraea keyboard line lazily a melody. The instrumental clues of ‘Song of the Earth’ are not the most successful, but neither the collaborations of Mount Eerie and Steve Lacy contribute, but are lost in the vast landscape of music.
‘Song of the Earth’ is a commendable and ambitious effort by Dirty Projectors, but surely live shines more than recorded. However, with its lights and shadows, ‘Song of the Earth’ has the immense value – so important in the current era – to be a tremendously original work because it is Dave Longstreth who writes it. Longstreth remains a composer with a special sensitivity to write melodies -both vowels as corals -and, although the music of ‘Song of the Earth’ melts with the “landscape” on more than one occasion -and it seems the intention -, the nature that is seen through its window is impossible to confuse with another. Although the blue sky is covered with smoke, it is still the sky of Dirty Projectors.
