Dirty Projectors are in that glorious mid-career period of being able to do no wrong. “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” is the latest turn on their victory lap — less dissonant than their Bjork team-up EP from earlier this year, more strummy than 2009′s Bitte Orca. It’s a Bob Dylan cover, so the band’s forgiven for making it sound like one. Would’ve been a nice fit on the I’m Not There soundtrack right next to Wilco, but it’s for Levi’s Pioneer Sessions: My 511s endorse this.
Dirty Projectors – “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” (Bob Dylan cover):mp3
It bears remembering that the Dirty Projectors made the finest album of last year. Mount Wittenberg Orca, a song cycle initially written for performance at New York’s Housing Works in a benefit concert organized by Stereogum’s Brandon Stosuy, isn’t a proper follow-up — but it is a worthy sequel. The mini-album finds the band diving head-first into the harmonic mazes they explored on 2009′s Bitte Orca, determined to reach the limits of indie rock lung capacity. The music stays spartan, leaving the voices room to shine (or shatter glass) and Bjork bjorks around harmlessly, sounding particularly nice playing call-and-response with the DP’s vowel sound montage on “On and Ever Onward.” Don’t play this one for your cat.
1. Stuart Berman ends his Dandy Warhols compilation review with a frustratingly overzealous and dishonest observation, writing, “The Capitol Years is less interesting as a compilation of one sporadically successful band’s stint on a major label than a road map through an evolving underground rock...
">Pitchfork Reviews Reviews: stuart berman and iron maiden morning roundup.
4. there was a quasi-incredulous New York Times story this weekend about how Iron Maiden is still selling a ton of copies of their new record (their 15th record), and also how they’ve sold an unusually small number of downloads of the record and also an unusually small number of illegal downloads has been charted. people in the record industry give all sorts of quotes about why they think Iron Maiden is still selling so many records, like generic “they work hard and engage with their fans and tour a lot” and some other euphemistic stuff like that, but nobody interviewed gets anywhere near the obvious truth about this, which i guess we can call the Eminem Paradigm or the Susan Boyle Paradigm:
okay not to overgeneralize here, and i’m sure there are plenty of bright Iron Maiden fans, but if you are an artist that attracts a particularly old or technologically inept fanbase, you will still sell records because your fans don’t know how to download music, illegally or otherwise. there’s no mystery about why like Godsmack and Avenged Sevenfold always make chart-topping records, and if writers acknowledged that people who are seriously buying Iron Maiden’s 15th record are old and maybe ummm not the most discerning tools in the shed/pennies in the fountain/knives in the drawer, than there’d be no need for incredulous newspaper articles about it. not to be needlessly smug about why Iron Maiden’s 15th record has sold more records than every Best New Album this year combined, but you know what i’m saying
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from Dave:
This is so true and obvious
I used to make jokes about how people who buy country music don’t own computers, which is mean-spirited and very left coast liberal of me but probably not entirely false.
It seems surreal that the Weezer of my teenage years is also the Weezer of 2010’s teenage years, but then again, the band should really change its name to “Assholes who don’t deserve your continued or newfound attention” so as to avoid confusion.