Dirty Projector David Longstreth takes it one song--and countless genres--at a time
It isn't always fair to judge people by the company they keep. But for Dirty Projectors songwriter David Longstreth, comparisons to recent collaborators Björk and David Byrne are unusually apt. While Longstreth's band has not yet reached the heights of fame achieved by the Icelandic songstress or Byrne's Talking Heads, they are patiently rising in the ranks of art-rock renown, their fan base growing with every new release. And Dirty Projectors is sure to win even more devotees with their sixth album. Bitte Orca (Domino) doses American pop with potent tinctures of its global counterparts. What results is the band's most powerful--and populist--collage yet.
Bitte Orca's first single, "Stillness Is the Move," would be right at home on R&B radio. The song luxuriates in a big, sensual backbeat and such starry-eyed lyrics as, "There is nothing we can't do" and "After all we've been through/ I know that I will always love you." But just when the song sounds ready to rival Ciara's disposable hits for catchiest confection of the summer, the instruments quiet and singer/guitarist Amber Coffman belts out a series of philosophical queries. "Isn't life just a crazy, crazy, crazy dream?" she sings. "Isn't life just a mirage of the world before the world?"
These sorts of juxtapositions make Longstreth a fitting heir to Byrne and Björk. All three performers work in the space where popular music and high art collide, refusing to choose between a hummable hook and a challenging concept. "It was like a door opening for me when I first heard [Björk's] Homogenic," says Longstreth by phone from Domino Records' New York office. Since his teen years, he has admired her "ability to entwine the abstract tendencies of art music with the immediacy of pop."
Like Björk, who once enlisted beatboxers, throat singers, and a variety of choirs in the service of an album-length celebration of the human voice (2004's Medulla), Longstreth is driven by ambitious ideas. On 2005's The Getty Address, he cast all-American guitar hero Don Henley as the protagonist in a song cycle critiquing our nation's pre-colonial history. Two years later, the Dirty Projectors released Rise Above, a re-imagining of Black Flag's 1981 debut Damaged. Longstreth claimed to have reconstructed 11 songs from the hardcore masterpiece entirely from memory, having long ago lost his cassette-tape copy of it.
Both of these experiments could have been embarrassing failures. But Dirty Projectors have only improved over the years, as each outlandish project challenges Longstreth to reach new heights of musical innovation. While The Getty Address mashed operatic choruses with electronic clicks and skips, Rise Above introduced the bright, African-style guitar and tantalizing, multi-layered vocal harmonies that have resurfaced on Bitte Orca.
This time, Longstreth says he abandoned the "intellectual, narrative frames" that guided his previous work. But that doesn't mean Bitte Orca is devoid of its own constraints. "I like to not do what I did immediately before," he says. "The challenge here was, if my propensity is always to write something as large as an album with 10 or 12 songs that really relate to each other, to make every individual song its own world."
In daring himself to shape each track independently, Longstreth has created an album that varies widely without sacrificing coherence. What ties the tracks together is a set of internal tensions, in which a sense of spiritual restlessness infuses even the bounciest choruses. "I like music that manages to be multiple, even contradictory things at the same time," Longstreth says.
Like "Stillness Is the Move," the revelatory "Useful Chamber" sounds deceptively ecstatic. Guitars chime, Longstreth repeats the chorus "Bitte orca, orca bitte" like a holy roller at prayer, and Coffman and bassist Angel Deradoorian "ooh" and "aah" at the top of their voices. But the lyrics to "Useful Chamber" are pensive and conflicted. "I don't know what I should be looking at/ But I will look wherever I'm told," Longstreth sings. On the glacial, romantic ballad "Two Doves," Deradoorian takes over the mic. Yet Longstreth, who rarely traffics in love songs, can't abide too many sappy lyrics. He follows sweet (if strange) nothings such as, "Your hair is like an eagle/ Your eyes are like two doves," with the deflating, "But our bed is like a failure."
For the first time, on Bitte Orca, Longstreth had the opportunity to write for a menagerie of voices he knows well. While he was once the band's sole consistent member, Coffman, Deradoorian, and drummer Brian McComber have all been on board since the release of Rise Above, and Dirty Projectors recently announced the addition of two touring members, bassist Nat Baldwin and vocalist Haley Dekle. "I imagine our personalities--or at least my cartoon version of everyone's character--as instruments in themselves," he says. Deradoorian's grave alto serves as a counterpoint to Coffman's light-footed vocal gymnastics. Longstreth's own plaintive croon treads the middle ground.
More than anything, the genre-saturated Bitte Orca, like Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Björk's Homogenic, is the work of an artist who can't help finding inspiration everywhere, from MTV to existentialism. "I love learning to respond to new shit all the time," says Longstreth, having just moments earlier professed an appreciation for the Auto-Tune stylings of T-Pain. "I try to put that into the music I make--a process of discovery for whoever's listening."
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4 comments.
Member since 4/9/2009
Think you may have misidentified David Longstreth in the print version. Think he's at 8 o'clock, not the fellow in the white tee at 5 o'clock as your caption reads.