Björk and Dirty Projectors aren't known for informality. They move freely, but within obsessively constructed worlds. They make the questionable choices lesser artists would be afraid to, and they do it on their own clock. But their reputation for being anal-retentive and self-contained is one of the reasons Mount Wittenberg Orca-- a recording of a song cycle performed last May for Housing Works, a charity and chain of upmarket thrift stores in New York-- is so refreshing. Dave Longstreth, the brain and foreman of Dirty Projectors, wrote the songs in less than a month, and the group rehearsed together for only a week. At a listening party the band held for the EP in late June, he explained that the songs were mostly recorded live and in the same room. The result is 20 minutes of music that sounds more dressed-down than anything Björk or Dirty Projectors have put out before. And while it's hard to imagine them working this stuff out while intermittently horsing around in the backyard, the performances here are casual, at least by their standards. The occasional blemishes aren't chinks in the armor, they're fortifying-- they're evidence of the group spirit at work.
The songs here are shorter, less cluttered, and just generally easier to listen to than Bitte Orca, which will disappoint you only if you love Dirty Projectors because of their relentless complexity. Some of this is a matter of instrumentation: Despite the spirit link that Longstreth, Amber Coffman, and Angel Deradoorian have formed over their guitar and bass playing, there's very little guitar in these songs, and the bass plays a comparatively conservative, anchoring role. The songs here focus on the singers. The DP women-- whose voices have a lemony, shrill quality-- continue their routine as android reconstructions of pre-rock backup singers; Björk still sounds like it has only been 10 minutes since she first crawled out from under a rock; and the blend works precisely because they don't try too hard to blend.
The songs, I'm told, are about whales-- or, more specifically, about a hike that Coffman took on Mount Wittenberg in Northern California. (All the proceeds from the record go to a National Geographic Society charity dedicated to the preservation of marine space.) One of the things I find interesting about Longstreth as an artist is how much he seems to need an external concept to be confessional, like covering Black Flag's Damaged as a way of revisiting teenage memories on 2007's Rise Above. Though a lot of the lyrics here are playful and relatively straightforward ("Beautiful mother up ahead of us, can you see us play inside the waves?"), there are a handful of moments where the lyrics transcend the concept. Björk, in a line that continuously shocks me out of the pretense that she's supposed to be a whale, sings "Come into my home/ Murder my family." By singing from the perspective of Coffman-- human alone in nature-- Longstreth is able to indulge in idealism that I suspect he believes in, but wouldn't feel comfortable owning up to in the dear-diary sense: "I am free/ I am not bound to the difference between the real and the real to me."
The EP is a small statement from artists who are accustomed to making big ones-- this isn't Volta or Bitte Orca. At this point, Dirty Projectors are on their way to becoming part of the New York elite, having also collaborated with the Roots and David Byrne in the past year and a half. Given that Björk probably isn't someone used to taking orders, her participation is a huge compliment to Dirty Projectors as a band and Longstreth as a writer. It's also evidence that Dirty Projectors still sound great without the endless overdubs and revisions-- evidence that whatever they could put together in a few weeks is still a lot more than what a mediocre band could put together in a career.
