Lamp Lit Prose

It's no secret that we all have kindred spirits out there. If we're lucky we can find them out of the billions of people on the planet. If we're even luckier we will get to spend some part of our lives with them. We're all out there searching for them, though, and in some ways that search is what keeps us alive.

It's also no secret to anyone that knows me well that I consider myself an NPR addict. Of all my podcasts only one isn't produced by an NPR affiliate (and it used to be but is now on Stitcher's network). I have tried others and they just don't stick, and I enjoy others when they're shared with me in the car or the like, but I consistently go back to NPR. This, of course, means that I listen to a fair bit of All Songs Considered.

Bob and Robin have musical tastes that, while at times predictable, are ones that I trust to steer me in a pretty good direction. I don't go ga-ga for everything they share, and this week's record is a perfect example of that. Bob Boilen loves this band. I think his love for this band is as large as his love for Sharon Van Etten. Also working in his favor is the rest of the staff of NPR Music; they bring genres to the table that he and Robin would never sound believable talking about.

Why then, can I just not really get in to Dirty Projectors?

Somehow I ended up with one track from their 2009 album Bitte Orca, and iTunes tells me I've played it fully through two times (the last was in 2014). In case you want to go check it out the track is called "Stillness Is The Move." It does nothing for me, and that's OK. The rest of the album is equal parts weird and guitar rock, and some of I like but most of it not as much.

But Dirty Projectors are back with a new album called Lamp Lit Prose, the second album since bandleader Dave Longstreth split from his bandmate/partner Amber Coffman. Longstreth poured their breakup in to the band's last album, 2017's Dirty Projectors, and couldn't even tour on it. He then started immediately working on a follow up, and Lamp Lit Prose is somewhat a return to form at least for me, in that it reminds me more of Bitte Orca. 

I took Lamp Lit Prose on the NPR 'recommendation' when they played "Break-Thru." Dear lord what an earworm - it's on the list of possible songs of the year. The song itself is some of the weird I mentioned above because the woman that Longstreth is singing about is some unattainable object of his affection, yet in that she's a breakthrough (because it sounds like a schoolboy crush). The rest of the album retains the pseudo-naïveté of the lead single; Longstreth certainly knows how the world works yet he's able to craft songs that are at times airy and light, at times electronic, and as dance-y or heavy as if he was that teenager with a new crush - when the world looks brightest and yet the impending armageddon of losing a school crush is temporarily ignored.

Recommended tracks: "Break-Thru," "Zombie Conquerer," "I Found It In U," "That's A Lifestyle"