Dirty Projectors are the best kind of experimental rock band — the kind that’s constantly growing and changing, but always with spectacular results and never in quite the way you might have predicted. Their sixth album, Swing Lo Magellan, is the culmination of a second act that began with 2006′s New Attitude EP, when frontman and songwriter David Longstreth first explored African- and South American-inspired rhythms and multi-layered vocal harmonies.

The record that followed, 2007′s Rise Above, seemed at the time like a strange experiment: Longstreth (who already had a concept album about Don Henley under his belt) attempted to reconstruct Black Flag’s entire 1981 album, Damaged, from memory, despite not having heard it for 15 years. But when Dirty Projectors’ massively popular, critically worshiped Bitte Orca appeared two years later, it became clear that along with being an exercise in memory and influence and reinterpretation, Rise Above was an opportunity for Longstreth to let content take a back seat to form, recruiting a trio of female vocalists and sculpting their voices to create dramatic textures. Bitte Orca’s innovation was bringing that sound, pioneered on New Attitude, to maturity — blowing it up to stadium-pop proportions, polishing its expansive surface to gleaming perfection, and pairing it with lyrics that complemented the music’s exuberance (“Yeah, I wanna / Remake the horizon”) and transcendence (“Isn’t life under the sun just a crazy, crazy, crazy dream? / Isn’t life just a mirage of the world before the world?”).

In an interview around the time of Bitte Orca’s release, Longstreth told me, “I like to not do what I did immediately before.” But before I heard Swing Lo Magellan, it was difficult to imagine how Dirty Projectors could move forward with a style they had already perfected. The answer, it turns out, was to embrace the rough and weird moments that can make imperfect music so much more compelling. … Read More