The Evolution of Brooklyn's Most Ambitious Bedroom Project
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Metro Pulse, March 2010
While Vampire Weekend may boast the larger font on the Big Ears Festival bill, it’s their Brooklyn cousins Dirty Projectors that are probably more ideally suited to the festival’s celebration of the offbeat.
Last year, dozens of year-end Top Ten lists heaped praise upon the Projectors’ sixth LP Bitte Orca—the afro-electro-art-pop extravaganza that anointed them the latest pied pipers of New York’s hippest borough. From one perspective, this record is the drum-tight culmination of nearly a decade’s worth of hit-and-miss experiments from the group’s Yale-educated, oppressively quirky mastermind Dave Longstreth. From another angle, though, it also serves as a non-threatening entry-point into Dirty Projectors’ considerably more intimidating back catalog.
Sure, fans of the slick, funky Bitte Orca single “Stillness Is the Move” might have a hard time wrapping their legs around Longstreth’s messy, self-indulgent dorm room tapes from 2002. But if you listen closely to those older albums, you can hear a highly ambitious artist planting the seeds for his own personal botanic garden.
Back Cataloging…
The Glad Fact (2003)
This was the first album issued under the Dirty Projectors moniker (Longstreth had previously released The Graceful Fallen Mango under his own name), and despite some beautiful moments, it mostly sabotages itself with forced, spray-painted eccentricities and a lot of yelping. On the surface, Longstreth sounds like a hi-fidelity artist limited by the clunkiness and noise of a lo-fi palette. In the 21st century, though, no such limitations really exist for the Yale student with a laptop, making The Glad Fact a tad less charming as a consequence. Also, there are several songs about finches.
Hints of Bitte Orca: “My Offwhite Flag,” “Naked We Made It”
Slaves’ Graves & Ballads (2004)
Originally a pair of EPs, “Slaves’ Graves” and “Ballads” were released as a combined LP in 2004, despite their extreme stylistic differences (the latter featuring just Longstreth and a guitar, and the former including some lush, James Horner-like arrangements from a mini chamber orchestra). Impressively, Longstreth seems quite comfortable on both sides of the disc, embracing the lovelier inclinations of The Glad Fact and allowing them to blossom here with fewer pretentious left turns. Longstreth’s voice also comes out of the shadows more in this collection, tackling some pretty heavy ballads with a quivery Arthur Russell-meets-Antony Hegarty delivery. For fans of Dirty Projectors’ sadder, slower moments, this is a must-have.
Hints of Bitte Orca: “Somberly, Kimberly” (sort of)
The Getty Address (2005)
Obviously, by 2005, Longstreth had reached the point in a young musician’s career where the only logical next step is a massive concept album about a suicidal Don Henley. Hence, we have The Getty Address—perhaps the pinnacle of both Longstreth’s quirkiness and ambitiousness. The album features about two-dozen different musicians—choral singers, horns, strings, junkyard percussion, the kitchen sink. While the orchestral flourishes can seem almost head-scratchingly out of place on some of Longstreth’s minimalist, melody-less glitch ballads, the whole thing starts to makes sense about halfway through, which makes it all the more disturbing in a way. There are some more finch songs, too.
Hints of Bitte Orca: “Warholian Wigs,” “Tour Along the Potomac”
Rise Above (2007)
After the Don Henley thing went over most people’s heads, Longstreth decided to slap on an extra layer of irony with another concept album—recreating Black Flag’s classic 1981 punk LP Damaged without having actually listened to the record in 15 years. Not surprisingly, only the song titles are particularly remindful of Henry Rollins. Instead, Rise Above became Longstreth’s bridge to the Afrobeat rhythms, noodling guitars, and soul-inspired female harmonies (Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian) that would help define Bitte Orca.
See: “No More,” “Rise Above”
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