Review: Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca (2009)
Ivy Leaguer and head Projectionist Dave Longstreth has been tirelessly cranking out music since he started the project in his dorm as a freshman at Yale. Although Rise Above saw the Projectors exploring and kneading their sound to great effect, they’ve come a long way from a more embryonic past that tottered dangerously between wonderfully creative and inaccessibly insular. The Glad Fact, in particular, exemplifies this, boasting very promising material (“Naked We Made It,” “Lit From Below”) and lamenting some heavy-handed missteps (“My Off-White Flag”).
Though Longstreth’s reimagining of Black Flag’s seminal Damaged suggests an incredibly comprehensive wavelength of influence, Longstreth insists his re-creation was more because it seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, rather than an act of homage born of slavish respect. To the casual listener, Rise Above might seem devil-may-care and lazy in approach, but to call it a cover album would be woefully inaccurate, and frankly, disrespectful. Two years later, Bitte Orca emerges as the culmination of their hard work, and unlike a host of other similarly tremendous albums this year, this one actually has a fairly charitable listening curve.
Commanding a restless muse, the entirety of Bitte Orca is dappled strata of inscrutable time signatures, excruciatingly complex harmonies, and layered mosaics of guitarwork. Longstreth couldn’t be much more of a perfectionist, and his faithful hours of rehearsal with the band has proved them to be, on the basis of this plainly excellent record, transcendental in the absolute. All exaggeration aside, calling it the record of the year might well be selling it short; this album is just as likely to end up setting pace on lists recapitulating whole decades and genres.
Dirty Projectors’ “Cannibal Resource.”
While Longstreth might reek of pretension — what with the album art depicting his perennial obsession with philosophy — at the end of the day, this isn’t technicality for technicality’s sake. Though it may seem contrived and clinical, or worse, a garish display of indie grandstanding, the album is so incontestably gratifying that it can’t possibly matter. Make no mistake about it, either: the pyrotechnics are impossible to miss. Bitte Orca is spangled with the aforementioned haphazard time signature shifts (“Temecula Sunrise”), staggering vocal interplay (“Remade Horizon”), and some of the most sensational harmonized guitar solos this side of Metallica (“No Intention”).
If Grizzly Bear deconstructed 60s pop and soul with “Cheerleader,” Longstreth’s Hendrixesque lefty Stratocaster re-codifies 90s R&B effortlessly with fluttering strums and arpeggiated cascades on “Stillness Is The Move.” There are few things more satisfying than the receiving the gift you didn’t know you wanted, and Amber Coffman’s stratospheric chirps and soulful improvisations are like the sudden, euphoric unveiling of those shiny trappings.
Not long ago, Veckatimest was being showered with sincere praise and being hailed by some, including HeiBräu, as some of the finest music this year. Bitte Orca doesn’t make Veckatimest‘s success any less potent, but instead, along with Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, affirms 2009 as a season of music to be reckoned with. Even among those exceptional albums, however, there may not be a triumvirate of tunes that can rival the unrelenting cohesion of tracks four, five, and six: the evocative “Stillness Is The Move,” the mourning delicacy of “Two Doves,” and the aching flexure of synthesizers around Longstreth’s crooning in “Useful Chamber.” Hearing the band explode into the refrain of “Bitte orca! / orca bitte!” is downright epiphanic, and as though that weren’t enough, it’s somehow made all the more stunning at the last thirty seconds, as the lead guitar gyrates madly behind the familiar chorus.
Like the breakneck, hooting vocal breakdown in “Remade Horizon,” Bitte Orca exudes a peculiar duality comprising quasi-opposites; it is simultaneously mysterious and inviting, sophisticated and relaxed, high-concept and yet oddly unassuming. In fact, Longstreth is quick to quell discussions of his own guitar chops, the band’s technical prowess, and razor-sharp harmonies, because he believes so firmly in the universality of the medium. It isn’t even just implied by the album itself, it’s an established part of the band’s musical ethos. To him, music no more belongs to the beloved indie star than any of the people that purchase the album; the complex aural filigree he so lovingly casts on every track is ever to serve the song, not the ego. It’s a dazzling juxtaposition of humility and grandeur, which is perhaps what makes its worth so challenging to translate. It isn’t difficult to quantify it, however: Bitte Orca is nothing short of a breathtaking modern classic.
[...] (Full-length review here.) [...]
HeiBräu’s Top 25 Albums of 2009 « HeiBräu said this on December 18, 2009 at 3:44 am |