Dirty Projectors 'About To Die' EP Review

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What would prompt Dirty Projectors to push out an additional EP only a few months after the summer release of the band’s latest effort, Swing Lo Magellan? Judging from the songs on About To Die, it’s not label pressure, financial necessity, or a simple glut of extra material; it’s death, something that frontman Dave Longstreth seems to spend much of his time thinking about. Not that some morbid realization has fearfully prompted Longstreth to anxiously produce as much material as he can in a race against time. It’s just that he needs more tape to figure out what death really is, to explain it, to explore it, and on About To Die, he accomplishes this artfully.

The EP contains all the skittering drums and offbeat, chiming guitar chords requisite to a “typical” Dirty Projectors album”if any of the band’s releases can even merit that term”but this time around, they’re in service of an idea: that the most important word in the album’s title isn’t die. It’s about. The bass enters and drops out at seemingly random phrase points during the title track; shifts in meter seem to take just a hair too long; female backing vocals enter for mere seconds before disappearing, and every passing moment in these songs exhibits something different. Each instant may give way to something else entirely: a string quartet break; gentle, panned handclaps; or a full-band explosion. Like the album’s title, these moments are always on the verge of something else. They are always about to.

This is what it is like to be alive, at least in Longstreth’s lyrics. When he sings the line “While you are here you are alive” during “While You’re Here,” the strong and swelling strings suddenly recede and play tremolo. They thin out into a trembling foundation that feels as if it could crumble at any moment under the weight of his vocals. Like the tenuous and uncertain strings, you are only alive “while you are here,” not forever, and not indefinitely. And just as that phrase concludes, the strings expand, once again full of power. That moment of change, when one thing instantaneously turns into something else, happens without warning. “I was a bone / Now I break in half.” Longstreth sings on “Simple Request.” “I was alone / ‘Til I saw you laugh.” These moments exist until they do not. At any point in time, what is about to be can instantly transform into what is. That, Longstreth seems to understand, is what death is as well.

To realize the fragility of every moment, and how every instant contains the possibility of its own non-existence, seems honestly maddening to any sane person. But for Longstreth, it only confirms a deeper commitment to the present. On “Simple Request,” he pleads, “I want to know who you are right now / Who you are right now.” It’s imperative that he repeats this question, twisting out the vowel on the last word of his second request into a shifting melisma, as if to try to hold on to a single moment. He has to. It’s impossible to know if what exists right now will exist immediately afterwards. Who you are right now is not who you are right nowRight now is always about to be not so anymore.

If this all seems too hopeless, at least Longstreth mitigates the muted doom of About To Die with a possible remedy in the EP’s bonus tracks. On paper, it looks like a cheesy cop out or a lazy appropriation of Lennon’s philosophy to call love the answer to existential angst, but you wouldn’t think so by listening to the bonus tracks “Buckle Up” or “Desire To Love.” Fuzzed-out guitars and bass joyfully romp through the mix as Longstreth declares, I’m still breathing / but only by the beneficent feeling of her desire to love.” He’s not just breathing, he’s “still” breathing. For a man acutely attuned to the fine difference between this moment and the next, that must surely be a relief.

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