The first (and only, as of now) time I saw Dirty Projectors was in early 2004. The version of I saw at the show in question consisted of the group’s founder and songwriter, David Longstreth, performing with an acoustic guitar. What I heard did not impress: there was a measured hesitancy in Longstreth’s playing, and vocally, he opted for a croon somewhere between Chet Baker’s and Jeff Buckley’s, but reaching the heights of neither. It was a strangely confrontational show, and I left it relatively unimpressed; I’d see interesting notices about subsequent Projectors performances and albums, but I did a fair job of tuning them out. And yet: when I heard the group’s 2007 Rise Above, consisting of covers of remembered Black Flag songs, I found myself listening to the album again and again. It was beautiful in places, and even more impressive in its evocation of how we remember fragments of long-distant melodies. Rise Above, at the very least, convinced me that I’d underestimated Longstreth or that his music had evolved in a direction more along my own tastes.
And now I’ve got 2009′s Bitte Orca in front of me, along with a glowing review by Paul Thompson in Pitchfork and a more comprehensive overview of the group’s music and working methods by Ben Sisario in the New York Times. I’ll confess that I’m not entirely in agreement with the prevailing notion that “Stillness is the Move” may be a defining summertime hit song, but I will say that “Knotty Pine,” their collaboration with David Byrne from the Dark Was the Night compilation, has a good shot at being my favorite pop song of the year, and “Two Doves” has been cued and re-cued through numerous sets of speakers around me in recent days. Much of this comes from the album’s use of vocals: Longstreth’s own have acquired a similarity to those of Craig Wedren, which allows for him to utilize a sometimes-unsettling cosmopolitanism. And the vocal trifecta of Amber Coffman, Haley Dekle, and Angel Deradoorian (whose solo work I’ve written about elsewhere) allows for the use of an imposing amount of range and complexity in the group’s songs.
It’s a pop record that I suspect I’ll be paging through repeatedly in the coming months. Though one piece of Sisario’s article struck me as particularly interesting, in terms of the long view:
Mr. Longstreth, who plays guitar and sings, remains the unquestioned leader and visionary, and the members each speak of him with deference. Even in a practice with Mr. Byrne, he seemed perfectly comfortable as boss and musical director, telling the women at one point to make their harmonies more “Slavic.�
While the article later goes on to reference “[t]he band’s embrace by Bjork and Mr. Byrne — who reached large audiences with music that, like Dirty Projectors’, tested the boundaries of pop,” I’m not sure I agree with the analogy. Is Bitte Orca the beginning of Dirty Projectors’ accessible pop period, or is it more of an isolated foray into large-scale accessibility? Time will tell, I suppose — but the music that the group is making nowadays warrants following.