CD cover - Dirty Projectors album Bitte Orca. Photo - Supplied
Rating:
* * * *
Verdict:
Big Apple avant-garde band deliver album of art and heart.
If you get the feeling, on first listen, that this New York band might be over-thinking it all with their confoundingly knotty jigsaw of a sound, then take heart and bear with it. This is actually them at their most approachable.
The previous output of the group, which revolves around the exceptionally clever clogs of David Longstreth, has included a couple of concept albums. One, The Getty Address, was an orchestrated piece inspired by - but not confined by - the life of Eagle Don Henley; the other Rise Above was an attempted tribute to Black Flag's hardcore classic Damaged done entirely from memory. As you do.
That's not to say Bitte Orca lacks for its own mad ideas among its apparently concept-free nine songs.
They come thick and fast right from the point, on opener Cannibal Resource, that Longstreth's voice starts the first of its vocal trapeze acts with trilling co-singers Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian.
Those acrobatics continue to even greater somersaults throughout.
And combined with the songs' fractured funkiness, this can start to remind of everything from Talking Heads' early Fear of Music to Bjork's old outfit The Sugar Cubes.
But by the sound of it they could easily drag, say, Beyonce in for a jam too - Stillness is the Move puts the women's voices out front on a song that's a brilliantly artpop swipe at contemporary girl-harmony R&B (and comes with three remixes on a accompanying bonus EP).
Elsewhere, though, it's the combination of Longstreth's androgynous voice and the music's unpredictable gear-changes which make Bitte Orca an oddball delight.
That's whether on The Bride it's starting off like a Jeff Buckley song which can't decide on whether it's best played at 33 or 45rpm or on Remade Horizon when the album's Afropop leanings burst forth at their brightest.
Some later tracks, like Useful Chamber and the closing Fluorescent Half Dome, aren't as melodically enticing, the scattershot songs sounding as if they are caught in their own musical hall of crazy mirrors pulling silly faces.
But even at their most abstract, Dirty Projectors' artpop still has a sense of abandon and invention that's hugely infectious.
Russell Baillie
'Unfortunately, my path to recovery is taking longer than expected.'