Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
10/10

A splurging collage of voices, guitar spats, handclaps and bass kicks, opener ‘Cannibal Resource’ is a catastrophic, breathless escapade into Deerhoof-meets-Antony-and-The-Johnsons-rock. Already paving the way for many of the world’s experimental contingents, Dirty Projectors has long proved itself. It’s ecstatic peace, blissful meandering and wandering through genres, stories and ideas. Crisp guitar chords fade over bitter bass and chomping handclaps. It’s sometimes hard to follow a melody with Dirty Projectors, they leave much to the imagination in their picturesque soundscapes but at the same time dutifully detail everything with absurdly colourful illustrations. Keeping it short and so catchy they leave you hanging at the end of every track, only to beautifully ski into the next, rosy-cheeked and fresh faced. Leaked to the internet two months before its originally planned release date of June 9, Dirty Projectors has hit that ugly wall of internet fandom – so ready are fans to get their greasy mitts on their music they’ll do anything to get it, but with good reason. Dirty Projectors is like the 2000s’ Pink Floyd or Yes: psychedelic perils with spaced out prog jams glistening with vitality, never-before-heard and utterly compelling. Bitte Orca could well be Dirty Projectors’ The Wall or Dark Side…, but modern and ever denser with ideas.

The rainbow ride of harmonies halfway through ‘The Bride’, intercepting an ecstatic wailing howl and driving guitar riffs is goosebump worthy, brought to a triumphant and celebratory close soon after to launch into the epic and unsettling ‘Stillness Is The Move’. Probably the best song I’ve heard all year, its almost Top 40-esque singing is delicately inter-layered with trilling, shrill guitar lines, sequenced with bursts of percussion and dabs of bass. The captivating wordless break in the bridge between musing on mountains echoes with soulful reverb. It’s the most flawless song I have heard for as long as I can remember. The song itself deserves a 100 out of 10. Glad am I to finally have a song to follow it, the proceeding ‘Two Doves’ is startling with its acoustic simplicity, but soon swells with orchestral glamour and a husky, dewy vocal drone. The two female singers of the band compliment each other effortlessly; both are honeyed but each staggeringly different. The heavy hand of orchestration on ‘Two Doves’ then segues into electronic manipulation in the curiously sci fi ‘Useful Chamber’, in which the title gets a cryptic working over: “Bitte, Bitte/ Orca, Orca” before a sea of female harmonies washes it away. Their perfectly trained, immaculately produced voices atop seamless and faultless instrumentation gives it not a clinical, studio-enslaved sound-effect. Rather a glistening modernity, a subtle frailty reflected in the gristly voices that pepper it, the distinctly different rhythms and layers meshing together to create an unnerving and descending sequence of songs that are so captivatingly unique and inspiring you’ll never want them to leave you. Ever.

With sheer Deerhoof-esque moments of scraggly guitar solo breakdown moving into thunderous raunch-rock territory quickly before you have a chance to comprehend the sudden change, Dirty Projectors is another band commanding unwavering attention with every move. The whole album is arranged so perfectly that transitions between flowing songs are not jarring but refreshing. Growing more and more enveloping and involving throughout, it earns its 10/10 rating easily; it never wavered beyond a 9. In a way its internet leak was a blessing, keeping transfixed fans illuminated by their new sound that with today’s speed of sound may have been submerged by something else come June. However that seems highly unlikely with this calibre of material.

The single ‘Stillness Is The Move’ has demanded many listens from me and I can see the album’s going to be even less forgiving of my time and my ears; once you meet Bitte Orca you’re likely to spend a lot of time with it.
Sarah

Posted by Sarah Gooding under Album, Reviews
No Comments