Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca reviews
Reviews by letter :
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y
| Slantmagazin |
 While a completely different species, musically speaking, than Animal Collective's monolithic Merriweather Post Pavilion, the Dirty Projectors's Bitte Orca is every bit that album's equal in terms of navigating uncharted sonic territory. Virtuosic but playful, unpredictable yet accessible, it's not a genre album, encapsulating too many ideas to be filed conveniently under an "indie" or "experimental" tag. Bitte Orca is a careening, three-way balancing act between the finger-picked experimentation of the Books, the math rock of Battles, and Of Montreal's gallivanting pop. If that sounds a bit scattershot in theory, the band smelts its influences into a nearly unrecognizable alloy, one that gleams with a newness that is realized in that ever-so-slender window of opportunity where each member of a band is firing on all cylinders.
The sound that bandleader Dave Longstreth has created on Bitte Orca is one of a chugging, smoke-huffing machine. Songs like "Temecula Sunrise" and "Useful Chamber" jerk and cough like so many churning cogs, occasionally driving their tempos up or down unexpectedly. One of the few exceptions to this nearly uniform musical theme is "Stillness Is the Move": The organic odd-man-out, it's a candy-coated pop song that might be what Mariah Carey would sound like accompanying a snake charmer's flute; the exotic loop that opens the song is hypnotizing, and band members Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman coo like pop princesses lost in a New Delhi marketplace. "Remade Horizon" opens with a summery folk trot before a synth dart tears through the acoustic guitars, making way for an emerging, corkscrew prog riff. Finally, the song culminates in a staggering vocal hocket courtesy of Deradoorian....full text |
|
| Thephoenix |
You're going to be hearing a lot more about this album than you might actually hear from it. Why? Because it's far simpler to succumb to a lulling, repetitive chorus of praise than it is to surrender to the pull of Dave Longstreth's often uncertain seas. His work under the Dirty Projectors moniker has been reliably unreliable — unmistakably his, but unconvincingly controlled. Often his concepts were like startled horses dragging the cart of the execution behind it. I'm happy to report that the crush of hype — sprung from a leak in the blogosphere two months early — is on point: the only thing Dirty Projectors' fifth album leaves me wishing for is a fifth rating star to wedge in. "Accessible" doesn't quite fit Bitte Orca, and it needs no disclaimer as "their pop album" — because it's not.
Perhaps the summit of Longstreth's achievement is his decisive victory over hyphenation. There's nothing to be gained from critical distillations of the various and varied sources of his inspiration — be it the strangely baroque kwassa kwassa guitar gestures of "No Intention," or the weird wormholes in "Useful Chamber" that connect his often Björkian electronics with the vocals of Amber Chase and Angel Deradoorian (characterized once by Longstreth himself as "disco car ad harmonies"), or the thoroughly modern, thoroughly mathy tense-and-release teasing of "Temecula Sunrise."...full text |
|
| Avclub |
| Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth has always had an air of pretension befitting a Yale musical-composition major; he uses his scratchy, soukous-style guitar playing and nervous warble (pitched somewhere between Arthur Russell vulnerability and David Byrne paranoia) in service of high concepts like The Getty Address’ bizarre, Don Henley-starring folktale and Rise Above’s Black Flag “re-imagining.” But Bitte Orca suggests that school is finally out for summer: “Look around at everyone / Everyone looks alive and waiting,” Longstreth sings over the loping, sun-dappled groove of the opener, “Cannibal Resource,” as close to a throw-your-hands-in-the-air moment as the band has ever produced—until “Stillness Is The Move,” of course. With its nodding R&B beat and Amber Coffman’s melismatic vocals, that breakout waiting to happen is but one “all the single ladies” shout-out away from being a Hot 97 jam. Over nine indispensable tracks, Bitte Orca forges a more perfect union between eccentricity and accessibility: The pop crescendos of “Temecula Sunrise” filter through what feels like 10 different time signatures; the warped electro pulse of “Useful Chamber” dissolves into finger-picked introspection before exploding in noise-rock abandon; restless guitar skitters, and esoteric Nico references add anxiety to the heart-stilling balladry of “No Intention” and “Two Doves,” respectively. Much ink will likely be spilled on 2009 being the year that Brooklyn’s experimental class finally went “pop,” and—with apologies to Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear—it’d be hard to find a better thesis statement....full text |
|
Dirty Projectors lyrics
All lyrics are property and copyright of their owners. All lyrics provided for educational purposes only
Copyright © www.sweetslyrics.com Please read our
Privacy policy - 0.02s
Send "Dirty Projectors " Ringtones to your Cell 
