With 2009’s
Bitte Orca, Brooklyn’s Dirty Projectors made an art-rock classic: a mishmash of West African guitars, screwball time signatures, funk beats and saintly harmonies that you could somehow dance to. The bar is high for the follow-up,
Swing Lo Magellan, out this month. Based on a few cursory streams of it, I think I’m all in. It’s wild and structurally fearless, like
Bitte Orca, but there’s more power behind it: Some of these songs really pummel you. I don’t know of another band out there that’s connecting brain and brawn quite so effectively.
— David Hudnall