David Longstreth, Dirty Projectors, and s t a r g a z e create finely-painted landscapes on Song of the Earth

Particularly for those listening within urban spaces – on trains, buses, and subways – the record’s lusciously-arranged strings and allusions to hopping ravens, summer light, and forest floors is a quite dreamy escape into an Edenic paradise, a place far away from the sensory overload of daily necessity, and welcomingly so. Once that surface is broken, though, so is the mood. Everything about this pastoral idyll, it quickly unfolds, is on a knife’s edge.

Of all the musicians to come out of 2000s Brooklyn, Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth is perhaps the most interested in the intricate possibilities of composition and melody, and of prising open pop’s many locked doors. A classically-trained musician, Longstreth has gone about forcing open these doors a great number of different ways. 2004’s Slaves’ Graves and Ballads – an album which combined Longstreth’s idiosyncratic and often knotty songwriting with orchestral arrangements – is perhaps the most analogous album from his varied Dirty Projectors catalogue to Song of the Earth, but where the strings in Slaves’ Graves seem to be at odds with Longstreth’s singing – one almost battling the other to assert control over each song – on Song of the Earth each element finds peace and solace in the other. Nowhere is this harmoniousness more tender than on instrumental pieces “Spiderweb at Water’s Edge” and “Raven Ascends”, in which Longstreth playfully hums along to collaborator Patrick Shiroishi’s plaintive saxophone.

The lineage from which Song of the Earth descends – the flora and fauna that occupies post-Pet Sounds Beach Boys and XTC’s paganistic chamber-pop odyssey Apple Venus Volume 1, for example – seems to demonstrate that pastoral lyricism and orchestral accompaniment are natural bedfellows, perhaps because of a string section’s ability to switch from light to dark moods – reflecting the way life in nature can be taken with the swipe of a claw or the opening of a jaw – in a way that a more quotidian guitar-centred band is unable to. This sense of light and dark is indeed something that Longstreth utilises in Song of the Earth, but to entirely different ends. The string arrangements performed by Berlin collective s t a r g a z e, beautiful and soaring in places, are ready to descend into discordance and dissonance at a moment’s notice, revealing the precariousness of the bucolic scenes the songs have painted. Composed in 2020, in the aftermath of one set of California wildfires, and released in the aftermath of another, Song of the Earth is an album that knows this precariousness all too well.

The breezy opening strings and acoustic guitar on album highlight “Gimme Bread” quickly becomes manic and urgent, and this tension is reflected in the lyrics’ allusions to scarcity and the fragile structures that provide mankind with its survival. On the suite of songs that begins with “At Home” and ends with “Our Green Garden”, meanwhile, what should be an idyllic pastoral scene – gazing absent-mindedly out of the window into the green beyond – is fraught with peril: “I awoke to smoke / and I choked / a little”. The window suggests a detachment, an impression of safety and distance from what is happening outside, but Longstreth’s creeping arrangement emphasises that this security is illusory: windows can be smashed, cracked, shattered by heat. On “Circled in Purple”, this pretence reaches breaking point: “Why aren’t we / reordering / our lives / same-day”.

These tensions are kept relatively subdued until “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One”. The words, taken near-verbatim from David Wallace-Wells’ non-fiction book Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future, are turned skilfully into a coherent and even earwormy song. It seems a song destined, though, to polarise listeners, not so much for what it says but for how it says it, for literalising what the album otherwise communicates fairly implicitly: “The slowness of global warming is a fairy tale / perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all”. The song is bold, inventive, and certainly makes the album’s thesis unignorable, but it does seem a pity that Song of the Earth’s more finely-painted landscapes of the anthropocene weren’t left to speak for themselves. The quiet beauty and terror found elsewhere seems, as a result, a little overshadowed. Then again, perhaps the point is that it’s too late for subtlety.

It remains to be seen whether Song of the Earth is just another curious left-turn in a discography full of them, or whether it signals a new Dirty Projectors epoch. What is certain though is that Song of the Earth is a thematically singular album, one which looks out of the window and faces up to what it sees outside, in a period in which drawing the curtains and looking inwards so often seems preferable.