Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Dirty Projectors’ album The Getty Address which you can buy here. Listen to “Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego” from the record down below and read about it after the jump.
For a little while, I booked shows in my friends’ living room on the third floor of their house on 16th Street in Washington, DC. Not a lot of people came. Standing in the kitchen before Nautical Almanac played, a man in a purple blazer and mustard corduroys with piercings and foofy hair joined the conversation abruptly. It was a little awkward. Then he said “You all know each other, don’t you?” and we did and he didn’t. But it was okay, we’re nice people. A few years later James who I saw around DC sometimes and I ran into each other on the street in New York, where he’d been visiting to screen The Getty Address, the animated musical he’d made based on the life of Don Henley with music by Dirty Projectors and featuring their mastermind Dave Longstreth as star. He gave me a copy of the DVD, which I watched, mostly aghast. There were battling bugs, ancient kangaroo cave paintings, a revolutionary war, sixteen-wheeler derailment, time travel and a girl I knew from around town braided and crooning as a sun goddess. It kept going, too, close to an hour, yet I kept watching, showed friends, most of whom, like me, were baffled by it, but endlessly stoked on how intensely rad it was. But an unintended side effect of how vastly visual The Getty Address, its soundtrack sometimes got lost as simply a fulcrum for the animated whirlwind, a reason for creative propulsion but not necessarily a creatively focal itself.
Without seeing it entirely, it is difficult for me to relay just how intensely bizarre The Getty Address is, but missing the visual, Dirty Projectors’ soundtrack quells the hyperactivity and allows the music its proper flourish. Recorded with a large choir and orchestra, the music is lengthy and large, all confident ebb. “Singing the role of Don Henley,” Longstreth doubles and chops his voice into a clumsy stutter, pitches things tender amongst a swollen mass of reeds and brass. Nowhere on the album is this clearer than on “Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego,” where Longstreth is a “one man choir,” backing himself again and again. Jolly jolly ego/ You fit in/ You fit in, jolly jolly jolly he pushes out with a warble, the repeated Ls run together, a gooey mesh underneath Longstreth’s own Silent Night-ish choral coo. There is a regular hit of something that sounds vaguely like a triangle, but it sounds like a triangle in the same way a bongo sounds like a snare; they’re both in the drum family. It takes tinny percussion calm and stretches it dingy and lazy and that unexpectedness leaves it a repeated pleasure, without the dry tinge of over and over. Occasionally the chorus and orchestra elope and there is just the regular beat of a drum machine for guidance; then the nonsensicality lapses away from the sound and back into the soundtrack, the music regains itself as accompaniment, the film’s composed associate. It’s that ability to wither when necessary that allows the fullness of The Getty Address to be as bright as it is. It’s certainly a flamboyant album, but not tacky and gaudy. Just wholly boisterous.
Related:
- Schnipper’s Slept On
- Live: Dirty Projectors at Bowery Ballroom
- Freeload: Dirty Projectors, “Stillness is the Move”
- DEPRESSSSED
- Audio: Dirty Projectors, “Rise Above”
- posted on Nov 13, 2007 in SLEPT ON
- tags Dirty Projectors
