Dirty Projectors' "Bitte Orca" excels

Dirty Projectors
ALBUM: “Bitte Orca”
LABEL: Domino

For those unfamiliar with Dirty Projectors, imagine taking two Mariah Careys and a man whose vocal range might suggest a lack of testicles and combining them with the lush experimentation of Grizzly Bear. In reality, the band is a Brooklyn-based group with a high turnover rate, their list of ex-members reading like film credits. On their current release, “Bitte Orca,” the key members of the group are David Longstreth, Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, who just released her own album, “Mindraft,” in May.
Dirty Projector’s last album, “Rise Above” was an eclectic remake of Black Flag’s “Damaged,” reinterpreted through their old memories into a soft blend of flying vocals and minimalistic electric guitars.
If completely turning inside out the aesthetic of Black Flag’s burly, masculine sound makes them sound artsy, that’s because they are. Their soundscape is what the phrase “head in the clouds” might sound like translated into music, mostly because their voices constantly wander into impossibly high octaves and have the courage to stay there and stretch out.
The band ditches the idea of having a central concept to an album with “Bitte Orca,” instead proving that their sound is distinct enough to tie several wandering, non-traditional tracks into a cohesive whole. With a title that combines the German word for “please” with a type of whale, this album is more into impressions and wanderings than concrete structures and meanings.
In fact, it’s the vague, blissful randomness of their lyrics that cements the band’s serene mystique. In the addictive track “Temecula Sunrise,” the main narrative centers on Longstreth’s house, and him inviting someone to live in his basement. At first it’s easy to put a picture together when he sings, “I live in a new construction home/I live in a strip beyond the dealership,” but then it melts into cooed phrases like “temperature rising … what hits the spot like Gatorade?” and loses all sense toward the end when he sings, “the face of earth will be white … Indian paintbrush.”
Tip for listeners: don’t read the song titles. They make up the choruses of many tracks, and it is more interesting to interpret them without knowing. (The album title itself is shouted triumphantly at the apex of the album on “Useful Chamber,” where it’s surrounded by walls of vocals as sweet as cherry Kool-Aid.) Trying to guess what Longstreth is saying is like a fun musical Rorschach test. In the track “Florescent Half Dome,” it sounds like he’s either saying, “for us, an ab tone,” or “for innocence, I’ve done.”
Not only is “Bitte Orca” an album that miraculously lacks any hanger-on tracks or boring moments (although “Two Doves” will slow the pulse), it also has expertly-crafted standout singles.
“Stillness is the Move” is already being posted on blogs left and right. With mildly eastern-sounding electronic strings and Longstreth’s vocals on a hiatus, the track shows off the interplay of Coffman and Deradoorian’s rubber band-elastic voices. The hook (a lot of “ahahah hoo oo oos”) plays with the band’s most intelligible lyrics, which are primarily a girl and a boy but also about how “life under the sun” is weird.
The band gets almost folky on “The Bride,” which starts with acoustic guitar and hand claps. A few moments later, their effortless cool quickly oozes in as Longstreth cheerfully sings, “No one has any good reason to live.” Quickly, the thick electric guitars come back, hand in hand with layers of helium angel choirs.
Sonically, “Bitte Orca” finds Dirty Projectors still in their familiar territory, but this time with an expertly-honed talent at whittling adventurous, addicting melodies out of a hi-fi surplus of singing.
(4.5 out of 5 stars)