The Getty Address

The Getty Address

Dave Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors makes music that is defiantly unclassifiable. His albums, even relatively focused works like 2007’s Rise Above, are unruly, musically omnivorous productions that borrow from an unimaginable wealth of divergent influences. Longstreth’s guitar playing often evokes the hyperkinetic squiggles of West African Highlife, while his arrangements can feature everything from primitive electro beats and string quartets to Gamelan ensembles and unending layers of angelic female vocals. The end result is some of the most breathtakingly original, if sometimes frighteningly dense, music to come out of the Brooklyn underground in recent memory. 2005’s The Getty Address may well be Longstreth’s most ambitious work. Though it’s nominally a concept album that engages the vast sweep of American history, its narrative is so fractured as to be all but indecipherable. This turns out to be immaterial as Longstreth’s breathtaking arrangements are this album’s chief attraction. Though The Dirty Projectors have since released more focused and coherent works, none of them can rival The Getty Address for unfettered creativity and stunning inventiveness.

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