Artist: Dirty Projectors
Album: Bitte Orca
Year: 2009
Grade: 4 pretzels
The reputation of Dirty Projectors and their leader, Dave Longstreth, terrified me long before I ever heard a single note of their music. Virtually every review of their music I’ve ever read includes the phrase “Yale music-composition major” and Dirty Projectors’ previous albums have included high-concept projects inspired by Don Henley and Black Flag. Up until now, I stayed far away from Dirty Projectors and what I perceived to be their rampant pretentions. However, the release of their critically adored Bitte Orca finally forced me to confront their music face to face.
The first thing about this album that grabs you is the multitude of weird chunks of music that stick out at extremely odd angles. “Temecula Sunrise” is perhaps the album’s biggest offender when it comes to this, since it refuses to be nailed down to a single time signature, instead shifting through what feels like a dozen different rhythms. While this musical unpredictability is both incredibly impressive from a technical standpoint and a creative one, it doesn’t make the song particularly easy to listen to. The music on Bitte Orca, for the most part, will not make you move. No rhythm stays around long enough.
The major difference I hear between Bitte Orca and the somewhat limited pool of earlier Dirty Projectors music I’ve heard before is a strangely strong grasp of melody and simple, pleasant tunes. The opening shattered guitar riffage on “Cannibal Resource” is pretty fun and catchy, as are the electronic squiggles of “Useful Chamber”. I find this album much easier to enjoy on a very tiny level than across its entire forty minutes. There are many wonderful, tiny musical details sprinkled throughout this album. You just have to slog through a lot of hyper-ambitious (perhaps overly so) songwriting to find them.
On Bitte Orca, Longstreth’s music feels like acoustic music that’s been oddly translated into electronic music…despite the fact that most of the instruments used on the album (guitars, drums, bass) are acoustic. On top of all this, there are the voices singing the suitably abstract and impressionistic lyrics. Longstreth himself has a very odd, strained voice that has a tendency to fly off on weird vocal tangents completely unconnected to the rest of the song. Making things even stranger are the two female singers in the band, whose voices provide lots of counterbalance for Longstreth’s yelping, but don’t bring any stability to this very unstable music.
Somehow, despite all this strangeness and a handful of songs that threaten to fall apart as soon as you start listening to them, Bitte Orca is an impressive album. There are few songwriters in recent memory who’ve made music this unusual and lawless sound semi-traditional. It’s also nice to see Longstreth steer Dirty Projectors away from strange, concept-driven records about Don Henley (of all people). Bitte Orca is a wacky album that is often quite confusing to listen to, but it’s also a well-crafted piece of work, showing what Longstreth and his band is capable of when they put aside their zany ideas and just write some damn music.
The first thing about this album that grabs you is the multitude of weird chunks of music that stick out at extremely odd angles. “Temecula Sunrise” is perhaps the album’s biggest offender when it comes to this, since it refuses to be nailed down to a single time signature, instead shifting through what feels like a dozen different rhythms. While this musical unpredictability is both incredibly impressive from a technical standpoint and a creative one, it doesn’t make the song particularly easy to listen to. The music on Bitte Orca, for the most part, will not make you move. No rhythm stays around long enough.
The major difference I hear between Bitte Orca and the somewhat limited pool of earlier Dirty Projectors music I’ve heard before is a strangely strong grasp of melody and simple, pleasant tunes. The opening shattered guitar riffage on “Cannibal Resource” is pretty fun and catchy, as are the electronic squiggles of “Useful Chamber”. I find this album much easier to enjoy on a very tiny level than across its entire forty minutes. There are many wonderful, tiny musical details sprinkled throughout this album. You just have to slog through a lot of hyper-ambitious (perhaps overly so) songwriting to find them.
On Bitte Orca, Longstreth’s music feels like acoustic music that’s been oddly translated into electronic music…despite the fact that most of the instruments used on the album (guitars, drums, bass) are acoustic. On top of all this, there are the voices singing the suitably abstract and impressionistic lyrics. Longstreth himself has a very odd, strained voice that has a tendency to fly off on weird vocal tangents completely unconnected to the rest of the song. Making things even stranger are the two female singers in the band, whose voices provide lots of counterbalance for Longstreth’s yelping, but don’t bring any stability to this very unstable music.
Somehow, despite all this strangeness and a handful of songs that threaten to fall apart as soon as you start listening to them, Bitte Orca is an impressive album. There are few songwriters in recent memory who’ve made music this unusual and lawless sound semi-traditional. It’s also nice to see Longstreth steer Dirty Projectors away from strange, concept-driven records about Don Henley (of all people). Bitte Orca is a wacky album that is often quite confusing to listen to, but it’s also a well-crafted piece of work, showing what Longstreth and his band is capable of when they put aside their zany ideas and just write some damn music.
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