Perhaps because of the condensed pace at which the album was written, the throughlines to the songs on Swing Lo Magellan are easy to pick out. Many of them are about societal collapse. Opener “Offspring Are Blank” recounts the Adam and Eve story through the lens of overpopulation, “Gun Has No Trigger” is a Kafka-esque nightmare about our impotency to effect change. “Just Like Chevron” is about the environmental impact of offshore drilling, told from the perspective of a man dying on an oil rig: “Don’t think I won’t try/ When I close my eyes/ Wherever the people will drive/ That’s where I will survive.” Longstreth, who was 30 when Swing Lo Magellan was released, was starting to think about the impact one leaves behind on the world when they eventually go. “About To Die” is about the fear of letting life pass you by and not really understanding what it all means. Though Longstreth still exhibits a knack for the surreal — “the vandal laughs into his hood,” “goblins dressed up like a wound” — his lyrics on Swing Lo Magellan are noticeably and purposefully less obtuse. “Foolish, I know, but I’m about to die,” goes the aching hook on that one. “There is an answer/ I haven’t found it/ But I will keep dancing ’til I do” is the chorus to another.
Sonically, the album is all over the place, leaping from shuddering 808 drum machine blasts to freewheeling folk songs. The two musicians that Longstreth cited most often as inspirations in contemporaneous interviews were Neil Young and Lil Wayne — disparate influences that exhibit his consistent fascination with melding decades’ worth of music history together. But simplification is the name of the game on Swing Lo Magellan: a desire to wield the same dynamics of Bitte Orca but with a lighter touch. The album alternates between layers both dense and airy: handclaps give way to booming drums, picked-at guitars turn slicing and back again. Swing Lo Magellan does more with less. Its back half is home to some of Dirty Projectors’ most satisfying and straightforward songs: the yearning “Impregnable Question,” which was a first take recorded in only 10 minutes, and closer “Irresponsible Tune,” which reflects Longstreth’s embrace of a more spontaneous mode of creation: “Sing all day/ Record and play/ Drums and bass/ And a guitar.” “See What She’s Seeing” and “Unto Caesar” feel like testaments to the primal joys of letting voices collide with each other; both songs create an intangible magic. And “The Socialites” has long been my personal favorite Dirty Projectors song, a song about otherness that is delicate and subtle and endlessly fascinating.
Bitte Orca and Swing Lo Magellan undoubtedly display Dirty Projectors at the height of their powers, and they act as perfect foils for each other. If Bitte Orca is an urgent attempt to create some sort of utopia, then Swing Lo Magellan is the moment when you realize that perfection cannot exist, when you throw up your hands and realize that you’ll never be able to know it all. Time has perhaps propped up Bitte Orca’s unfettered ambition a bit more than Swing Lo, but both albums are stunning in their own right. For an artist who long prided himself on a puzzle-box approach to music, that Dave Longstreth was able to pivot so successfully to a simple but rewarding collection of songs — or at least make the whole idea of a “simple song” the main conceptual thrust of an album — is nothing short of remarkable.