Send "Dirty Projectors " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Let’s get the rather strange yet essential set-up out of the way first. Stereogum writer Brandon Stosuy invited Dirty Projectors and Bjork, mutual fans of each other’s music, to collaborate on a benefit show performance at a New York bookstore. After discussing what to play, the two camps decided to collaborate on brand-new material for the performance, instead of just cranking out their greatest hits. Later that month, Dirty Projectors vocalist Amber Coffman witnessed a family of whales on the Northern California coast near Mount Wittenberg, and Projectors songwriter/frontman/crazy man Dave Longstreth connected the two ideas by writing a 20-minute song cycle about the experience, designating each vocal performer a corresponding whale character. Longstreth plays the part of Coffman; Coffman and fellow vocalists Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle assume the roles of baby whales; and Bjork, the mother of all weird, alternative vocalists, appropriately plays the family matriarch. Mount Wittenberg Orca is the result, and the proceeds will be donated to the National Geographic Society, helping create “international marine protected areas”. Got that? Helping marine life is certainly a worthwhile cause, but as much as Bjork and Dirty Projectors want to raise awareness about whales, Mount Wittenberg Orca will ultimately raise awareness about their music, which is a worthwhile cause all on its own. As an encore for Dirty Projectors’ highly acclaimed 2009 full-length Bitte Orca, Mount Wittenberg Orca is a knockout. It works completely, even when removed from its unorthodox origins. Then again, “unorthodox” is pretty standard stuff for Longstreth and company. Their music has a tendency to mix the extremely foreign and experimental with the catchy and familiar. Longstreth is a master of mood and color, pairing the most unusual of musical elements (“How about a string quartet, and then we’ll do a electro beat…or how about some white noise?!”). A track like “Stillness Is the Move” from Bitte Orca is their most pop moment, with its R&B vocal stylings and bright production, but the twisted guitar figures and layers of sound keep it firmly planted in the strange....full text |
| Onethirtybpm |
| The premise of Mount Wittenberg Orca sounds like a parody of the self-aggrandizing genre of nauseatingly overwrought indie rock. I mean, summarize this EP in a sentence: it’s seven songs that tell the story of existential realizations about our relationships with mother earth, as seen through the lens of a based-on-a-true-story encounter between lead female vocalist, Amber Coffman, and a family of whales. To top it off—I shit you not—Bjork was invited. Clearly, Longstreth and the sirens are taking a risk here. The long time knock on the Dirty Projectors before the release of the incredibly inventive but palatable Bitte Orca was that Longstreth was just too challenging. No one ever doubted his musical talents or virtuosity, but whether his music was a victim of his own genius was the question. And Bitte Orca seemed to answer that very question by blending Longstreth’s musical nerdyness with hooks that half of Brooklyn was whistling last summer and R&B rhythms that made his artistic quirks feel almost cool. But, from the very first minutes of this EP, it’s clear that the Dirty Projectors aren’t continuing the gradual journey toward a more mainstream sound. Mount Wittenberg Orca is incredibly bare, especially when held up next to the wall-of-sound the band crafted on a lot of Bitte Orca. It’s vocal heavy, chockfull of the Dirty Projector’s patent hocketting and Bjork’s dreamy cries. It’s almost totally void of any of Longstreth’s wonderfully messy guitar licks. It uses its empty space carefully. But, pretty incredibly, this daring EP works. The fact that it does is truly a testament to where the Dirty Projectors are as a band right now. Sure, Mount Wittenberg Orca sounds a bit melodramatic in theory, but in practice it manages to be far from heavy-handed. And the trick is its simplicity. Longstreth and the ladies aren’t trying to split the atom on this one, in fact, the song production and craftsmanship feel a little rushed (possibly because they were). But it’s this lack of polish and complexity that allows the EP to feel disarmingly genuine and sincere. In all the ways the Dirty Projectors past albums seemed contrived, but often brilliantly so, this EP feels unfiltered and spontaneous....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Released digitally with little fanfare, Mount Wittenberg Orca sounds like the perky, efficacious soundtrack to a particularly boring ecological video game. In reality, the EP is just about as vestigial. It was born out of a Stereogum-prodded collaboration between Icelandic chanteuse Björk and New York indie rockers Dirty Projectors, a benefit concert to be performed at a Manhattan bookstore. Rather than repurpose their own greatest hits, such as they respectively are, they whipped up a 20-minute cantata about a family of whales and, it seems, their quest to find happiness, harmony, and breathable water. As the liner notes on the album's website indicate, Björk once again portrays a fiercely protective matriarch, this time in a much more supportive environment than was offered to her by Danish sadist Lars Von Trier. This time, she doesn't get cacked during the "Next to Last Song." That said, the septet of ditties here suggest there's precious little time to waste, otherwise Bj-Örca and her school of closely microphone'd calves will end up washed ashore, biologically abused, elementally polluted. In fact, it might already be too late. One of the songs is pointedly called "When the World Comes to an End." The proceeds earned by the EP are earmarked for creating international marine-protected areas through the National Geographic Society. However noble the cause, it also makes the whole enterprise sound a little bit fatalistic, as though there's already little hope for the majority of the Earth's water surfaces, and the best that we can do is cordon off a few small areas. Within the narrow confines of the EP, that uneasy balance between hopelessness and guarded optimism is given voice through the blend of Dirty Projectors's bouncing vocal harmonies (the gratingly forthright "eh-eh-eh-eh" verses in "On and Ever Onward") and Björk's reliably magenta undertones (and yes, I do mean "magenta" in the Blanche Devereaux sense)....full text |
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