Sufjan and Vincent wear their steel-jawed seriousness well, but of the three, only one dares to have fun. This is where Dirty Projectors breach new territory. And from both comes a flair for uncontrived drama, for unaffected theatrics, for unpretentious extravagance. From the introverted balladry of Sufjan Stevens comes the pastoral noodling that ebbs and flows with the album's tides. From St Vincent's knotty art-rock, Dirty Projectors borrow jarring, angular guitar figures.
And yet, as admirers of Jackson Pollock can attest to, from chaos comes great beauty.īitte Orca sprawls across a bizarre spectrum of influences. One may as well sling buckets of colour across a canvas and call it a painting. They fashion riffs and hooks from arpeggio croppings like some slapdash collage, winding threads of melody splashed with vivid impressionistic bursts of backup singing. On paper, the music of Dirty Projectors is similarly messy.
From up close the art of Monet is a confusing mess of scalloped paint blobs, but by stepping back one comes instead to appreciate placid ponds and sweeping skies. It is to some extent counterintuitive to think of a whole as more than the sum of its parts: a single water molecule is not wet a single neuron cannot think.
