Dirty Projectors, Lamp Lit Prose

[Domino Recording Co.]
Grade: B+

Lamp Lit Prose is the raucous wake that follows Dirty Projectors’ self-titled funeral. Several of its tracks—“Break-Thru,” “I Found It In U,” “You’re The One”—are tinted by the blush of new love, a 180 from Dirty Projectors’ chopped-and-screwed breakup blues and toward the polyrhythms and world-music influences of the project’s late-’00s peak. It’s strange to hear new Dirty Projectors songs that sound like old Dirty Projectors songs, but it’s also great to get some signal-scrambling guitar solos from bandleader David Longstreth, or the “Temecula Sunrise” tension-and-release of “Zombie Conqueror.” Dirty Projectors felt like an ending, but Lamp Lit Prose suggests several new beginnings and an army of collaborators looking to help Longstreth find inspiration and passion among the ashes. That’s especially true in quieter moments like the tootling psychedelia of “Blue Bird” and the smoldering Badalamenti-isms of the closing track whose title sums up the album’s emotional content: “(I Wanna) Feel It All.”

RIYL: 2009. A public crisis of relevance that became a fruitful collaboration. Charmingly sincere lyrics with inadvisably sincere allusions (“Just hanging out all Julian Casablancas”).

Start here: “That’s A Lifestyle” is a chirpy protest song that breaks from the album’s primary themes, gets at its desire to shred, and repays the harmonic debts the Haim sisters owe “Stillness Is The Move.” [Erik Adams]

Pram, Across The Meridian

[Domino Recording Co.]
Grade: B-

Compared to its onetime labelmate (and closest analog) Stereolab, Pram’s supernatural pop was always one click further toward completely bewildering—less Space Age Bachelor Pad Music than full-on extraterrestrial, the band bending Faust-ian krautrock, Raincoats warble, and film-noir jazz to its determined and whimsical will. The group’s first album in 11 years is also its first without vocalist Rosie Cuckston, and with her goes a lot that once made Pram so impenetrable (to some). Across The Meridian is, naturally, largely instrumental, a free-flowing, expertly sorted collage of ’60s filmstrip jazz and psychedelic library music that folds in airy snatches of founding member Sam Owen’s voice, far gentler than Cuckston’s eldritch deadpan, within woozy brass and keening theremin. It makes for a generally more approachable version of Pram’s eclectic electronic cabaret—one that would make a fine soundtrack to a fever-dream matinee of B-movie sci-fi and gumshoe thrillers. Although, that also means that, more so than Pram’s previous work, it often slips innocuously into the background.

RIYL: Stereolab. Moonshake. Laika. Broadcast. Joe Meek. BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Any kind of music that comes with an “avant-” prefix.

Start here: Opener “Shimmer And Disappear” is as good an entry point as any, a spooky, slightly kitschy swirl of dramatic trombone whomps and eerie synths over a bright, jazzy backbeat. [Sean O’Neal]

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