Lens Crafters

All art, in all mediums, is ruled by two elemental forces, two axes
upon which all work finds its determinate definition: “form” and
“content.” For some artists, the allure of pure form overwhelms (see:
Philip Glass, Alfred Hitchcock, et al.); for others, expression of
content takes primacy (Yukio Mishima, Otis Redding, et al.); while the
very greatest of artists (Thelonious Monk, Herman Melville, Akira
Kurosawa, Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, James Brown, et al.)
achieve stunning marriages of both. Only the essentially foolish or, in
the most charitable examples, the “naive” or “outsider” artists do not
actively mind these forces in their own work and proceed based on their
own judgment of what is most valuable.

Brooklyn-based experimental pop band Dirty Projectors is inarguably
one of the most self-engaged bands working today, and for this they
should be commended. As a project of such active artistic
consciousness, titles in the world of their work are invariably
weighted with meaning. The name “Dirty Projectors” itself communicates
a great deal about the foundational focus of the group—throughout
their long and densely prolific career, the dissection of form and the
dressing and distortion of content-delivery have dominated their work.
Their 2007 album Rise Above, the record that in many ways
initiated the group’s present momentum, was an exercise in experimental
song-production; based only on a lyric sheet retrieved from childhood,
guitarist/songwriter/singer Dave Longstreth “covered” the songs of
Black Flag’s classic Damaged album with entirely new melodies
and arrangements. These sorts of high/experimental art methodologies in
composing work ultimately designed to land as pop music have become the
defining aspect of Dirty Projectors. Their new album, Bitte Orca (the group’s most excitedly received album to date and first album for
semi-major Domino), finds the group on a new level of engagement on the
front lines of Form vs. Content.

In a recent interview with Time Out New York, Longstreth
stated, “It’s really, totally a goal of mine to take simple elements
and combine them in a way that feels new.” And indeed, the true victory
of Bitte Orca proves to be its sweetening distillation of the
wildly varied elements of the group’s previous catalog. The
faux-juju/Malian guitars, the bursts of Deerhoof-ish bombast, the
post–new music chamber arrangements, and the overrich jazz
melodiousness are all present, but rather than the songs feeling
subjugated by their component parts, as has sometimes been the case in
the past, the components feel happily and gloriously submissive to the
compositions. Put simply, the songs on Bitte Orca are not just
greater than the sum of their parts; they achieve such a level of pop
euphoria that they manage to render invisible the wildly diverse and
unusual elements in play. (This is a rare and remarkable feat, and one
most toweringly achieved by Prince, an important point of reference to
the work of Projectors.)

Lyrically, despite the oblique strategies apparently employed on
Bitte Orca (they have spoken in interviews of employing charts
of pop-music clichés to produce some of the album’s text), the
album largely maintains a simple air of sun-dappled joyfulness. The
record’s lyrics are nearly always successful in feeling visceral, even
if when inspected closely they often reveal a degree of tinkerly
emotional distance. The baldly romantic “Temecula Sunrise” and the icy,
RZA-reminiscent “Useful Chamber” achieve peaks of utter loveliness,
while the closing, elegiac ballad “Fluorescent Half Dome” brings the
band the closest it has yet come to the easygoing/ecstatic quality of
the best of modern R&B.

In the same Time Out interview, Longstreth spoke admiringly
(and somewhat longingly) of the transcendent confluence of complexity
and emotionality achieved in the work of artists like John Coltrane.
What Coltrane and other touchstones like Michael Jackson (RIP,
eternally) did, and what Dirty Projectors do now, is not synthesizing
the intellect with emotion, but developing and refining the
intellectual aspects of music to the point where they become emotional.
Rather than using form to present any driving concepts or feelings,
they pursue a space where the form itself can enthrall the mind, body,
and spirit. Though Dirty Projectors’ music remains for now closer to
the intellect than to the infinite, their pursuit of this musical space
seems clearer than ever, and with Bitte Orca they have made a
tremendous advancement toward achieving this elevated ideal.