If you’re gonna like the Dirty Projectors’ sixth album, then you’re gonna have to make a few concessions. Mainly, you’ll have to entertain the notion that band leader David Longstreth is New York’s most plausible heir apparent to Talking Heads’ David Byrne. After all, both are relentlessly post-modernist, driven by high-concept projects – try 1979’s ‘Fear Of Music’ vs. 2005’s ‘The Getty Address’; 1980’s ‘Remain In Light’ vs. 2007’s ‘Rise Above’ – and both have successfully mixed polyrhythmic Afrobeat with experimental Western pop. Crucially, though, the two are bound by a determination to combine the above in recognisable-yet complex packages: pop art in its truest sense. Thus, with ‘Swing Lo Magellan’, Dirty Projectors are exiting something of an “Eno period” – the batshit ideas are still nominally present, but the execution is a little less, as Dave Jnr puts it, “florid” – making this album their very own ‘Little Creatures’; a melody-focussed opus that reinforces the notion of Longstreth’s band as songwriters, as opposed to sonic adventurers. All of which is fine, incidentally, as it’s pretty fucking awesome. The silky-smooth hook of ‘About To Die’ is balanced delicately atop rattling electronic stutters, while the intricate layers of ‘Just From Chevron’ propel Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle’s delectable harmonies into a dense finale. Sure, these are pop songs, but they’re still very definitely Dirty Projectors songs too. To write the album, Longstreth relocated, Bon Iver-style, to a house four hours outside of New York, cutting himself off from friends and family. With that in mind, the lyrical directness is fascinating – “You’re my love and I want you in my life,” he declares on ‘Impregnable Question’, with those elastic vocal cords reined in to subtly moving effect. Long-term fans may be justifiably concerned that the exploratory exhilaration of previous records has been lost, but this sense of warmth is a more than adequate replacement. “Without songs we’re lost/And life is pointless, harsh and long,” croons our hero on the understated, Cole Porter-esque closer ‘Irresponsible Tune’. Let the days go by with ‘Swing Lo Magellan’ and you might just feel the same way…