Delicate, sensitive, feisty and cerebral, the record is a career achievement from notoriously eclectic frontman David Longstreth, who finally decided to zero in on songwriting and style.
While artsy contemporaries Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear obscured their so-called masterpieces behind dense clouds of reverb and harmony, Dirty Projectors had no shame in flaunting the naked, waif-like sexiness of its songs on Bitte Orca. But Veckatimest’s greatest gift is something that, in a culture of irony and detachment, is becoming a rare and under-appreciated commodity: simply, an occasion to feel. The shipwrecked beauty of “Dory” and “Ready, Able,” the layered intensity of “Fine For Now” and “I Live With You” and the pop mastery of “Two Weeks” all sound calculated down to the core, yet remain unbridledly emotional and human. Veckatimest is a paradox, somehow displaying the scrupulous, detail-obsessed work that went into it while still seeming transparently effortless. The band has one of today’s most complete and attuned rhythm sections, two phenomenally gifted vocalists in Ed Droste and Dan Rossen - the latter also being a vastly inventive (and underrated) guitarist - and, most importantly, the maturity to keep from collapsing under the immense sum of its parts. And, as with any pop masterpiece, the melodies are guaranteed to induce shivers - the warm kind, of course. It uncannily melds the warmth of melt-in-your-mouth sunshine pop with the coldness of electronic cyborg drones. Put simply, Merriweather is the decade’s definitive electro-pop album (but to simply call it “electro-pop” would be utter sacrilege). Double-helix polyrhythms and mind-dripping textures grace wedding-cake song structures, walking the fine line between airtight and twisty. The album is an irrefutable crackerjack, an experimental pop record of startling maturity and immediacy that consistently shimmies the ears without ever spilling over into the noodly realm of overindulgence. While Merriweather finds the indie iconoclasts tempering their signature banshee wails and zero-gravity space jams, these Animals haven’t been neutered. The Animal Collective gang may have grown up, but they’re definitely not wearing ties.