Band of the Week: Dirty Projectors

Hometown: New York City
Album: Bitte Orca
Band Members: Dave Longstreth (guitar, vocals), Nat Baldwin (bass), Amber Coffman (vocals, guitar), Haley Dekle (vocals), Angel Deradoorian (vocals, keyboard, guitar, bass), Brian McOmber (drums),
For Fans Of: Talking Heads, Led Zeppelin, Frog Eyes

If Dirty Projectors frontman Dave Longstreth needed any evidence of his band’s acceptance among the giants of art-rock, the first week of May 2009 should have provided plenty. Within five days, the lanky Brooklynite and his bandmates shared stages with avant-garde royalty, first performing with David Byrne their standout collaborations from Dark Was the Night, then playing an original Longstreth composition with Bjork a few nights later at a Housing Works benefit concert.

For a man who has largely resided at the fringes of musical visibility, scaring away less adventurous listeners with his bizarre fixation on birds and elaborately arranged vocal polyphonies, it was a confirmation of Longstreth’s unique genius, crystallizing seven years of songwriting. Dirty Projectors have arrived, and their new album Bitte Orca is their invitation for everyone else to celebrate with them.

Earlier Dirty Projectors records, Longstreth says, were mostly him “pursuing the music in a sort of abstract way, just trying to do whatever the song I was writing suggested.” But he wrote Orca with his whole band in mind, though he lacked a blueprint for the album overall. Instead, he approached it on a song-by-song basis, setting aside the vividly intertwined themes of Mexican history, brown finches and a suicidal Don Henley (from 2005’s The Getty Address) and the drawn-from-memory recreation of Black Flag’s Damaged (2007’s Rise Above). The result is a series of songs that are more direct and decidedly more accessible, from the crashing Led Zeppelin-ish acoustic pop of “Cannibal Resource” to the constantly shifting “Remade Horizon.”

“Obviously, there’s a lot of development that happens from the beginning to the end,” Longstreth says. “And sometimes when you’re in the middle of that, you’re like ‘Wow! Who knew that this antelope fetus would turn into a flowering redwood tree?’”

The most striking tracks are the ones Longstreth wrote for his two main female vocalists, Angel Deradoorian’s synth-pop ballad “Two Doves” and Amber Coffman’s twisting R&B abstraction “Stillness is the Move.” The latter takes on a pronounced Mariah Carey vibe, which Longstreth fully intended. “Hell, yeah,” he says in response to the reference. “I feel like music like Mariah Carey and Beyonce, and 80s and 90s R&B music, and that super fluid and expressive style of singing is something that I’ve been trying to use for years. The sense of latticed, architectural, well organized space and rhythm was something that I obsessed over with Rise Above and The Getty Address. I guess I’m not really digesting it so much, just letting it sit there.”

But Bitte Orca’s songs don’t stay still for very long—they’re wildly imaginative and unpredictable, full of intricate little time changes and textural shifts that reward repeated listens. The guitars twirl and tangle in majestic knots, the vocals are splayed out in majestic harmonic patterns. It may be a tough to follow for someone not used to Longstreth’s characteristic quirks, but his restless creativity certainly places him in good company.

“I like to have a protean vibe, just constantly switching my shit around but having the faith that there’s going to be some sort of consistent thread through what I’m doing,” he says. “All of the artists that I really admire have always done that, from the Beatles to Miles Davis and Bob Dylan, just constantly going where they need to go.”

“So I guess it’s surprising to me how unequivocally people are taking to the new material,” he adds thoughtfully. “…It’s very affirming. It feels very nice.”

Listen to "Cannibal Resource" from Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca: