Not so long ago, it would have been a bizarre novelty if Stephen Malkmus had tried his hand at a sonata, or if Interpol had staged an evening-length multimedia work at Lincoln Center. But concert music needed to loosen up once the old divisions became almost absurd to maintain, and indie bands—well, as their industry collapsed, they needed money, and some had reached a level of professionalism that easily upscaled. Now we don’t think twice about Bryce Dessner, Annie Clark, Julia Holter, or Hamilton Leithauser splitting time between hang-out and sit-down shows. Why shouldn’t David Longstreth?
Dirty Projectors seem ideally suited to this kind of thing. They distinguished themselves with complex time signatures, mosaic vocal techniques, nonlinear structures, and ambiguous tonality—sweetly coated, sour-centered. Their magpie psych-pop has often snagged bits of classical in its darting path. Yet Song of the Earth, Longstreth’s first major piece for a large ensemble, shows how different writing an hour of concert music is from writing an hour of songs. It’s a challenging, arduous, fitfully rewarding work that favors density and creativity at the expense of clarity and continuity—long music for short attention spans.
Song of the Earth was commissioned by the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e, conducted by André de Ridder. Though named after Mahler’s song cycle Das Lied Von Der Erde, the album evokes late-’60s auteurs like Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, and Scott Walker, their juiced-up harmonies and huge, shivery arrangements swirled into the nervy minimalist brew of contemporary chamber music. Longstreth has said he wrote the first draft in six “manic” weeks, disoriented by the new pandemic and new fatherhood, and that really is the best word. With 24 tracks, often subdivided into little cubicles, it’s a long hour that keeps starting over. Dirty Projectors’ Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, and Olga Bell contribute a lot, and guests like Phil Elverum and Steve Lacy are in there somewhere. It’s probably best in concert, for which it was designed. But at home, it’s nearly monotonous in its restless variety.
Though the overall picture is blurry, the individual parts can sound good, with a few exceptions: “Gimme Bread” is an early primer on the album’s unique mess and excess. As Longstreth croons under his range, there’s a Pet Sounds-y part, then a harp freakout with people chanting, then a riffy part, all before the menacing Pharoahe Monch-style horns burst in, taking the climactic insight about bread a little too seriously. In “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One,” Longstreth sings an extract from a climate journalist’s book verbatim, which seems like a cool thing to try before instantly seeing why it doesn’t work well at all, let alone with a little gospel-rap prelude.
