Artist: dEUS

Album: Keep You Close

dEUS, on Keep You Close, build smoky, minor-key rock grooves and lock into them, building and shaping each over the course of about five minutes. Their singer Tom Barman, the American among these giants of the Belgian scene, used to remind me of Kermit’s nephew Robin the Frog and/or Emmet Otter and/or Gobo Fraggle. His vocal tone still remains from those comparisons, but Barman’s shed his boyishness (though less so than has the late Jerry Nelson, who voiced all three). He sings, now, of romantic relationships that are rocky, or that one ought to know better than to try, or that one settles for because of a need to feel strongly about someone. It’s probably just as well that I’m not picturing, sandwiched among them, Barman chirping “I’m a big frog now, I’m five!”.

Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs guests on Dark Sets In and Twice We Survive, making sure I think of Afghan Whigs’ Black Love with all its sweep and barely-restrained aggression as a useful comparison. Dark Sets In inhabits an ex-boyfriend turned voyeur. Twice We Survive has lines that would be apology on their own (“Too smitten to be just a flirt/ Too loose to be connected/ I gave you less than you deserved/ And less than you expected/ Cause twice I set my mind on you/ And twice I gave you nothing”), but is set at the beginning of attempt number three, with a warning that it’s unlikely to be any different. Ghosts is relatively perky, with the tuneful tinkling of steel drums and Barman’s laid-back rapping (along with his more anxious singing), but the wryness of “It wasn’t till I met you that I realized/ I wasn’t living in a movie but a franchise/ Just a couple of changes but the same old thing/ The sequel was a flop, let the third one begin” doesn’t make me want to live that scenario, and the tolling bass chords and booming drums make their own skepticism known by the second half.

My favorite songs on Keep You Close — Constant Now, Second Nature, the title track, the ones I named above — are the ones that best follow the formula: the bruised not-quite-vanished boyishness of the singer steering us into increasingly ominous (but danceable) music. dEUS used to be woolier, more playful and experimental; like many of their fans, I love them most for 1997’s In a Bar, Under the Sea, where you never knew what sort of groove was coming next. They aren’t that band anymore, which was disappointing in the mid-aughts; but Keep You Close shows me they don’t need to be. They’re more proficient now: they do what they do, very well indeed.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

Artist: Dirty Projectors

Album: Swing Lo Magellan

One of the most basic music-theory concepts — I don’t know the fancy ones — is the “interval”: the gap between one note and the next. A “first” is the same note repeated. A “third” is two letters apart in terms of the note name: for example, a C followed by an E. The third might be a “major third” C to E, “minor third” C to E-flat, “augmented third” C to E-sharp if the key’s eccentric enough, or “diminished third” C-sharp to E-flat. C to G is a “perfect fifth”, part of the major and minor scales. In pop songs, you’ll hear lots of major and minor thirds, lots of perfect fourths, and a fair share of perfect fifths —  but hit songs avoid intervals larger than that. Most of us in the radio/YouTube audience are crappy singers; the bigger the interval, the more likely we’ll sound like an idiot trying to sing along. Therefore, the more likely we are to resent the singer making us feel like an idiot. What a pretentious twit the singer must be, for showing off that way.

Perhaps Dave Longstreth — singer, guitarist, and mastermind of Dirty Projectors — *is* a pretentious twit. He’s prone to explaining his songs in interviews by asking stuff like “What could true dissent be? What is a 2012 Exodus from the Society of the Spectacle, to mix language Situationist and Rastafari?”, which is a smart, interesting question phrased in a really annoying way. Many people find his melodies annoying too. They’re relatively full of sixths and sevenths, leaps towards the unknown; and while I have no intention of laboriously turning his tunes into sheet music, I’d expect to find lots of augmentation and diminishment among his intervals, tricksy violations of the “happy”/”sad” principle of major and minor. Longstreth’s own flexible, keening voice is paired with frequent female harmonies from Amber Coffman and Haley Dake, and together they make some unlikely chords.

Which means, the way *I* hear it, that Dirty Projectors are out there making exciting tunes that few other bands would dare. (Possible bias: my singing voice is thin and erratic, but leaping intervals is a thing I’m okay at.) They’ve also been getting more accessible from album to album. Where 2005’s the Getty Address was slow and dense with classical instrumentation, by 2009’s Bitte Orca it was fair to describe them as a rock band, and Stillness is the Move, a genuine alterna-hit single, was bubbly, funky, and cheerful in its West-African-inflected way. Follow-up Swing Lo Magellan is softer, leaner, and prettier — among the influences Longstreth has cited is the R + B vocal-harmony group En Vogue — and well-designed to win over skeptics to their melodic approach. It finished 11th on the annual Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, it peaked at #4 on Billboard’s Rock Album chart: not bad.

Highlights: Offspring are Blank is spooky doo-wop over erratic whispering machines, that erupts into classic-rock guitar heroics. About to Die uses African drumming (talking drums included), deep sweet-sounding cello, and an especially long and clever melody that by the chorus — more doo-wop inflections — is even more accessibly lovely than Stillness is the Move, though just as West-African. Gun Has No Trigger has very basic arrangements, putting all its emphasis on the daring interplay between Longstreth’s singing and Coffman’s/Dake’s “ooooohs”. See What She’s Seeing quietly does exotic things with guitar de-tuning, skittering IDM drum machines, and very nice classical violin. Unto Caesar is even relaxed and casual: not the precise, rousing horn parts, but the shuffling rhythm, and definitely the studio back-chatter. I know, I’m obviously supposed to be charmed when one of the gals asks “When should we bust into harmony?” and responds to a Longstreth lyric with “Uh, that doesn’t make any sense what you just said”. But it works, it works.

Bitte Orca remains my favorite Dirty Projectors album: that was a top-10 album for my 2009. Swing Lo Magellan gets a lot of its accessibility via soft, sappy pop stylings: the half the album I’d file under Avant-Manilow is objectively fine yet not for me. Except the single Dance for You, I guess. Plus the echoey, wobbly folk song Irresponsible Tune. A good melody can carry me through a lot, really. And the more notes you’re willing to use, the more melodies you have to pick from.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!