Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

So much has been written about Bitte Orca, the newest album by indie rock’s Dirty Projectors, that it’s an almost daunting task to find something worth bringing to the table that hasn’t yet been discussed at length. In the digital age, it’s akin to reviewing, like, Thriller or Revolver or something. The immediacy and over-saturation of the Internet has rendered my thoughts typical; discourse is redundant. What’s left to be said about an album released three weeks ago whose Google search results in well over 1 million hits?

Greeted with a level of pre-release hype amongst indie circles this year that was surpassed only by the likes of Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear, Bitte Orca is the group’s first album on the Domino Records label, and finds the band working at their peak (for some listeners, this statement will be interpreted as an enormous compliment; for others, mild praise).

The chief singer and essential mastermind of the project, Dave Longstreth, is a wildly divisive vocalist; he sounds a bit like the lovechild of Freddie Mercury and Antony Hegarty, if you can imagine such a horror. And his voice is all about horror, anyway: he’s seemingly incapable of channeling anything beyond frenetic elasticity. His falsetto bends and winds its way around opener “Cannibal Resource,” which sounds a bit like something Prince might have written on a coke and heroin binge in 1986. (The small bass riff surely must be a nod to “Kiss.”) The female choir is eerie and haunting — a recurring theme all through this trip.

I really don’t have a clue what Longstreth is crooning about here or anywhere on Bitte Orca, but it’s equal parts infectious and annoying, which is the simplest way of summarizing the album as a whole. In both tone and substance: it’s bizarre, frustrating, unique, and derivative all at once. I’m not sure how that’s possible. Then again, I’m not sure how Longstreth does that with his voice.

Album’s lead single, “Stillness is the Move,” is arguably the best – and most accessible – tune on display. Like much of the album, it has a white-boy Afro-Pop edge: think Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel tossed into a blender, castrated, and mixed with, I dunno, U2 or something. Longstreth actually moves aside on this track and lets the girls take over to full effect. “Two Doves” is a ballad that would have been better as a half-assed replication of “When Doves Cry,” especially if it had been recorded in the same manner as Rise Above (the band’s 2007 Black Flag-inspired semi-cover-album). I just remembered that scene in Freaks and Geeks when James Franco is listening to “Rise Above,” headbanging his way through the track, and ends up going through a two-hour punk phase that ends with a disastrous piercing. That was kind of funny; these are the sort of aimless thoughts that Bitte Orca invokes.

I’m digressing because I find it difficult to write at length about this record, opting instead to rely upon nonsensical ramblings (which, to be fair, seems oddly appropriate given the album’s nature). It is — as tired and meaningless a description as this may seem — an experience. You just sort of have to, you know, hear it.

“Useful Chamber” is a nice song – it opens with a fuzzy, Black Moth Super Rainbow-ish synth riff before opening into a beautiful melody. On a second spin, this track seemed to linger a bit more than any others, and I found myself forced to replay it.

Bitte Orca has proven itself to be highly controversial amongst music fans, driving them to either side of the critical spectrum – there are those proclaiming it to be the “Album of the Year,” and others asserting its inferiority. One friend of mine described it as a whole lot of “unlistenable noise.”

I’m inclined to believe that there’s something interesting at work here, though I’m less inclined to believe its alleged “genius” was calculated. Longstreth is not a brilliant visionary, but he has created a masterpiece to the extent that he is capable. Bitte Orca is either deliberately frustrating or frustratingly deliberate, but in any case, it’s worth a listen. Or two. Or three.

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