Results tagged “davelongstreth”

Dirty Projectors' new album, Bitte Orca, is a multi-faceted dream of a work: sometimes it feels like a rock album ripped straight from 1974, sometimes it’s an elegant string-supported beauty, sometimes it’s a pop album practically ready for the sweetness of radio, and still even other times it’s an oblique dash through counterintuitive song structures and harmonization. Often, it’s all of those things at once, as for the first time the wizard vision of lead man Dave Longstreth has graduated from mere experimental chops and into full-fledged songs. Put all that together and it gains Dirty Projectors entry into what's been a recent hit parade through Austin, joining such 2009 über-luminaries as Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, and Bill Callahan at our local venues. While the instrumentation, led by Longstreth’s singular guitar work, is flawless and captivating in its execution, the big draw that makes the Dirty Projectors stand out is the astounding vocal interplay between Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, whose tangling of voices in shocking yet artful ways will be on full display tonight at Red 7.

The pressure’s been building behind Dave Longstreth’s meandering Dirty Projectors project for the last few years, and 2007’s excellent if somewhat mystifying Black Flag covers/“reimaginations” album Rise Above brought listener intrigue to a new high—could it be that idiosyncratic oddball and Yale dropout Longstreth was growing nearer to accessibility? It seems so, and, really, the career trajectory here is not at all unlike that of fellow 2009 darlings Animal Collective, in that both started out hyper-obscure and intentionally abrasive, with an emphasis on willful experimentation and defiance of gratification, only to slowly but surely move towards a refined confidence in heightened normalcy. And that’s not to suggest that either outfit has shirked their uniqueness; they instead have learned to channel their innovation in a way that produces complete songs that human beings will actually enjoy, rather than just fragmentary attacks on musical reason. For Dirty Projectors, that turning point is embodied in the sparkling Bitte Orca.