Dirty Projectors

The Getty Address

A A A Comments By John Cramer Thursday, Aug 11 2005

Listening to the new Dirty Projectors CD, The Getty Address, makes me realize that hearing this while high would be suicidal. Why, you ask? Well, because it's a concept album about Don Henley having a mystical experience on a mountain ridge at dusk. Scared yet? No?

Fear this.

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How about this: To me this CD sounds like what would happen if members of a neo-hippie commune took peyote and formed an interpretive drum circle based on Fantasia. Getting the picture? This record also sounds like Adrian Belew from King Crimson fronting the in-house jam band from a mental asylum, creating the soundtrack for their annual production of Fellini's Satyricon. Yes, it's that scary.

On the song "I Will Truck," an insistent sound keeps recurring in the mix that bears an uncanny resemblance to the stuff coming out of the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At times, the music is somewhat interesting, a little like Indian ragas, or Tibetan monks blowing those gargantuan horns, but mainly this just blows my horn.

It's easy to review a CD like this because there's so much to complain about. To its credit, I promise that you don't have any CDs that sound anything like this one. It is unique. But for me, it all adds up to either a really bad joke that I admittedly don't get, or simply a collection of songs by some guy who likes to write epically strange hippie music.

Plague-like. Avoid.

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