Udo the Alpaca and the Stillness

Fell asleep to Stillness Is the Move and had the most genuinely strange dream I’d had in months—colors, something like adventure, a texture I couldn’t name on waking. The kind of dream that feels like it has plot, meaning, architecture, and then dissolves completely the moment you open your eyes. I had the outline of a blockbuster in my head for approximately four seconds and then it was gone. No millions. No live-in housekeeper. Thanks, brain.

Dirty Projectors have been around since 2002, which I didn’t know until I looked them up, and the lineup history is longer than most bands’ entire discographies—Dave Longstreth cycling musicians through as if it’s a project with a rotating cast, not a band with permanent members. There’s something both admirable and faintly exhausting about that model. The music doesn’t sound exhausting, though. Stillness Is the Move is structured like R&B filtered through something stranger, the harmonies stacked in a way that shouldn’t work and absolutely does.

The video features a camel or a llama or possibly an alpaca—I watched it twice and still couldn’t identify the animal. I’ve named it Udo. Udo seems entirely at ease in the desert heat in a way I am constitutionally incapable of being.

The lead singer is very good-looking, which I noticed first and then felt slightly self-conscious about, because the song is genuinely excellent and deserves better than being appreciated primarily as a backdrop for attraction. It can be both things. It is both things. Udo would agree.