Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

If Bitte Orca contains one communicable message, it is this: Dirty Projectors are growing up. But don’t go genre-fying them.

For a band whose previous projects have run the risk of being rebelliously art-snobbish—including an album of re-imagined Black Flag songs and a tribute to Don Henley—Bitte Orca shows that band leader Dave Longstreth has become comfortable in his own quirky skin.

And thank the Lord for artistic maturity. The album displays the band’s virtuosity in a compact set of nine songs. The first single, “Stillness Is the Move,” juxtaposes Angel Deradoorian’s almost operatic, Mariah-like voice over a driving African beat. Meanwhile, Amber Coffman’s self-reflective balladry on “Two Doves” cites fellow chanteuse Nico’s lyrics from the transcendent song “These Days.” As Coffman pleads, “Don’t confront me with my failures.”

But the album has nary an inkling of failure; Longstreth commands the band’s diverse instrumentation with precision. The scratchy guitar freakout halfway through “Useful Chamber” screeches to a halt as Deradoorian and Coffman explode into a swelling harmony. Moments later, the time signature runs ragged into aural oblivion: Longstreth shouting “Bitte Orca, Orca Bitte!” while noisy chaos rages in the background.

“Useful Chamber” is a crystallized microcosm of the album as a whole. Why focus on one structure when you can run the gamut of rock music in nine songs? Bitte Orca proclaims that Dirty Projectors don’t need a unifying, rebellious aesthetic to blow the lid off of modern music. As “Stillness Is the Move” declares, “There is nothing we can’t do.”