I don’t know what ‘bitte orca’ means, and I must say that I’m also having a similar problem in trying to work out what the hell the new Dirty Projectors’ album of the same name is all about. Just where on earth does this insane, art-pop-neo-folk-chamber-rock-minimalist-afro-r’n’b odyssey fit into the scheme of things? There’s Kasabian, and then there’s Dirty Projectors. What kind of fucked-up logic is at work in a world that presents us with such radical contrasts in artistic worth? Did the same God who made West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum make Bitte Orca?
I think not, and in actual fact it’s not really all that difficult to position this latest offering from Dave Longstreth and co, to realize that Bitte Orca is so obviously and emphatically what the world needs right now. Even if large swathes of the western population don’t know it yet (notably most of our fellow citizens here in the UK) we’re surely now coming to the end of the great nostalgic postmodernist joke that got out of hand. This was a chapter of our cultural history which began in earnest in the mid-nineties with the arrival of the devout pastiche-driven retrogressiveness of Britpop, and subsequently deepened into a bewildered and backward-looking decade-and-a-half that saw just about every stylistic movement of the late-twentieth century pillaged and travestied in superficial principle-less fashion, until every shred of futurism and vitality was squeezed out of a once noble, radical and meaningful alternative/independent scene.
We’re now at a juncture where many people who really should know better genuinely think the future of British music lies in the hands of a slickly-marketed, fashion supplement-courting Kylie Minogue knock-off. So friends, I’m afraid it’s time to for us to choose sides. Will we carry on down the path of music-as-lifestyle, of shallow ironic referencing of past cultural (non-)glories, of dumbing-down, of pop music as commercial sell-out rather than populist art? Or will we side with the Dirty Projectors’ exhilarating, intelligent, experimentalist vision of what twenty-first century music can amount to if underwritten with a bit of idealism, bravery and (dare I say it) pretentiousness?
Listen to Bitte Orca, and the decision should be immediate and conscious-bypassing. The album opens with a series of evocatively filtered late-period-Beatles guitar strums and, from here on in, its becomes evident that the DPs have finally managed to pitch the art/pop quota just right; in doing so they might just have elevated themselves to the position of standout creative role models for a newly forward-thinking musical generation. Everyone should have heard by now about the laugh-out-loud total freaking genius of lead single ‘Stillness is the Move’, that seems to suggest a perfect synthesis of post-Timbaland r’n’b pop and leftfield adventurousness, while sounding so effortlessly instantaneous and physically joyous as to literally knock the breath out of you the first time you hear it.
The Grain 