new moons (life is elsewhere)

“I want to live inside (Jorge Luis) Borges’ mind. In fact, I hope my entire life is just a daydream that he is having as he drinks his morning coffee.” – David Longstreth, interviewed on Plan B #24

Well, yes. Some strange things are happening here – probably a lot to do with the idea of living inside someone else’s head, which actually doesn’t sound too strange when coming out of David Longstreth’s mouth.

Where the comforting smugness about his past Dirty Projectors ventures – be it reimagining a bunch of Black Flag songs on Rise Above (2007), or fabricating Don Henley into bizarre fiction on The Getty Address (2005) – renders his compositions mostly unlistenable, the new Bitte Orca taps straight into a vein of fantastical pop music that sounds easier to comprehend and, importantly, quite uncannily accessible. The songs having a much broader appeal, and Longstreth is learning to make the most out of the band’s influences. (And a couple of quick caption-like thoughts to back this last line up. Dirty Projectors is doing the whole Talking-Heads-of-our-generation better than TV On The Radio. Some parts of Bitte Orca reminds me of Prince’s Purple Rain.)

“Cannibal Resource” sets out the terrain: weird guitar chords ringing out anxious and flirtatiously; multilayered voices carrying a hungry, volatile force and motion that reverberates through Longstreth’s sense of awe about everything that is around him – “Everyone looks alive and waiting”, indeed. After that good start “Temecula Sunrise” is where one truly starts easing into the strange behavorial patterns of Bitte Orca. The song resembles a breezy morning drive through shitty streetscapes of a sickly suburbia, a deceptive acoustic tranquillity grazed by the twitchy electric noise the band produce in the background.

“The Bride” is Longstreth doing his contorted troubadour thing, probably the album’s weakest link and yet the band again pulls it together with a workshop of musical deliriousness. The girl vocalists take over the reins on the next two. I’ve read the stunning “Stillness Is The Move” being compared to Aaliyah and Mariah Carey (which kinda makes sense because Amber Coffman apparently grew up singing mainstream R&B), but that doesn’t explain how the joy and jubilee of this chic centrepiece can sound quite so life affirming every workday morning without fail. Angel Deradoorian’s “Two Doves” is almost just as good in a totally differently way, a delicate lamentation that comes across like something out of Nico’s Chelsea Girl album, not least because it share this one really tenderly candid line with “These Days”, as written 40 years ago by Jackson Browne: “Don’t confront me with my failures”.

The colossal-sounding “Useful Chamber” articulates Longstreth’s crush with eyeliner; the unpredictable and yet totally captivating way he wrings some sort of manic, disbelieving pathos out of an electronic pop anthem as choppy and eccentric as this song is. And as if the Dirty Projectors’ agility and mastery over the pop idiom on Bitte Orca is still not obvious, the sprawling, mutant soul music of “No Intention” would be more than enough to seal the deal; or, the lovers rock of “Remade Horizon”, with its flurry of joyous rhythms on which Amber and Angel harmonize like wildflower souls. “Fluorescent Half Dome” wraps things up with the album’s most indefinite moments of gravity defiance, as Longstreth’s inventory of dream sequences loom up and away, floating towards new moons.

I listen to this shit so much and yet I don’t think I have quite let the merits of Bitte Orca to fully sink in and write coherently about it. But fuck that. Probably no other record released this year has better abused the unclassifiable memories of every fucking day of our lives; nine perfect songs to help us through our trials and tribulations time out of mind, to help us in our daily cup of sorrow.