Dirty Projectors are once again a group effort. Their new EP is helmed by singer Felicia Douglass, whose smooth voice is an antidote to Dave Longstreth’s ceaselessly complicated arrangements.
Dirty Projectors has always been a balancing act—an experiment in counterweights, and the calibrated chaos that results from tipping the scales. Frontman Dave Longstreth deals in reds and blues, innocence and experience, assembling strange geometries from the building blocks of the pop idiom. But what’s remarkable about Flight Tower, the second of five planned EPs from a reinvigorated Dirty Projectors, is just how stable it feels. Across four tracks, Longstreth and his collaborators grasp at defined boundaries and solid forms, drawing on the freed-up sensibility of 2018’s Lamp Lit Prose to present long-held affectations with renewed immediacy.
With three new members now officially in the lineup—Maia Friedman, Felicia Douglass, and Kristin Slipp, all accomplished solo musicians with their own projects—Dirty Projectors are a group effort for the first time since the early 2010s. Their harmonies swirl, punctuate, and hang in the air. Where Windows Open, the first of the five EPs, featured Friedman on lead vocals, Flight Tower centers Douglass (Slipp will steer the third and Longstreth the fourth, with “everyone trading verses” on the fifth). The Dirty Projectors catalog is full of flashy vocal performances and declarative multi-part harmonies, but Douglass’ voice runs cooler and subtler, its smoothness an antidote Dave Longstreth’s ceaselessly complicated arrangements. Under her aegis, the music breathes.
At just over 10 minutes, the EP is short enough that its appeal is mainly textural; these are isolated glimpses of a larger sequence, vignettes that point to something more fully formed. But Flight Tower is assured enough to evoke its own themes: songs about wonder and change, the peculiar magic of involving yourself in another person and of involving that person in you. Even at their most unmoored, they’re always gesturing toward connection. The loose, jittery “Lose Your Love” recalls “Cool Your Heart,” the Dirty Projectors highlight co-written with Solange, though the palette here is softer, and hews closer to R&B. A relatively traditional verse-chorus structure anchors the track’s lovestruck, free-associative lyrics. “Inner World” takes a similar tack to more fraught emotional territory, smoldering over keyboards and wind-up clicks. “Where is it taking me?/I can only know/After the tides recede/And we are free to grow,” coos Douglass, yielding to the ebb and flow of certainty. Though it’s freighted with apprehension, its titular refrain feels like a refuge.
The second half of Flight Tower is more self-consciously experimental and ambiguous, leaning harder on glitchy, splintered surfaces; the emphasis is on the fact of feeling, rather than its precise expression. On the propulsive “Empty Vessel,” Douglass carves out another moment of psychic and aesthetic respite. “We’re facing forward/Or/With our eyes closed/We are dreaming/Of the coast,” she sings, syllables shadowed by warped, echoing fragments of memory. As on Windows Open, the band eschews ten dollar words—those “grayscale conjurers” and “lifelike perjurers”—in favor of simpler confessions. The effect is mesmeric and, in spite of its fussy architecture, newly grounded. “Self Design” explores that tension with more overt digital tricks, teasing a sample of Ravel’s Miroirs before lapsing into staggered, recursive melodies. Meaning slips, but puns persist: “What’s your love but/Safe design? Self design.” Douglass’ pronunciation renders “safe” and “self” identical.
There’s a line in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 about a “high magic to low puns,” the secret power of the false familiar. It was there in Bitte Orca’s “Two Doves,” as Angel Deradoorian collapsed “feather” and “failure” into a single, mystifying hybrid word. And it’s here, too, channeled through a new set of musicians. As the world folds in on itself and language fails, these songs hold fast to what’s real, to conventions and people we can be sure of. It’s no coincidence that “inner world” sounds so much like “in a world…,” a kind of call to imagination; Flight Tower is an invitation to complete the thought.
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