Album Review: Song Of The Earth by Dirty Projectors, David Longstreth & s t a r g a z e

Particularly for those listening within urban spaces - on trains, buses, and subways - the record's lusciously-arranged strings and allusions to hopping ravens, summer light, and forest floors is a quite dreamy escape into an Edenic paradise, a place far away from the sensory overload of daily necessity, and welcomingly so. Once that surface is broken, though, so is the mood. Everything about this pastoral idyll, it quickly unfolds, is on a knife's edge.

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At first glance, the decision to credit this release to both David Longstreth and Dirty Projectors seems redundant, being that he is the only permanent member of that band, which itself started out as a vehicle for his own songwriting. Had there been no mention of Dirty Projectors, though, you wouldn't have made it ten minutes into 'Song of the Earth' without heading to Google to check if this was actually the same David Longstreth. This wild, sprawling 24-track suite is way out of his traditional wheelhouse, an epic song cycle in collaboration with orchestral collective s t a r g a z e that suggests an all-or-nothing approach to stepping outside of his comfort zone; here, he has taken a left turn at 100 miles per hour.

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