Album Review : Dirty Projectors and Bjork - Mount Wittenberg Orca
- Written by Russell Warfield
It’s a dilemma we’ve all had to face at one time or another. You’ll be taking a walk on a lovely April’s day when suddenly you spy a family of whales larking around just off the coast of northern California. Being struck with inspiration, you spend some time composing a handful of awesome songs written from the perspective of a family of whales. “Beautiful mother up ahead of us, can you see us play inside the waves?” you’ll sing earnestly. But – and here’s the million dollar question – who are you going to ask to sing the part of mother whale? Answer: Bjork, duh.
Having managed to enlist one of the world’s most well respected artists as their collaborator for the songs on Mount Wittenberg Orca, Dirty Projectors seem eager to prove their worth through sheer technical ability and various vocal acrobatics. The backing vocalists of Dirty Projectors have proven plenty of times that they have insane skills and talent, but they’ve never pulled off anything quite as jaw-dropping as the lightning paced three part polyphonic harmonics of ‘When the World Comes to an End’. Whilst the songs are relatively straightforward in terms of structure compared to last year’s Bitte Orca, it feels like the band redoubles their efforts in terms of musicianship so as to impress their collaborator Bjork.
The instrumentation is often almost nonexistent: minimal percussion and simplistic bass lines are employed as mere anchors for the look-at-me vocal gymnastics to the extent where it can feels as if the record is a showcase or a aural experiment more than anything else. The first track, for example, ‘Ocean’ is an ambient, throat clearing exercise that only sets out to prove that the Projectors can pull off bizarre harmonies to the backdrop of a one-note drone. However, songs such as ‘When the World Comes to an End’ and ‘On and Ever Onward’ prove that the Projectors can still combine their exploratory technical invention with their penchant for accessible pop tunes.
Bjork, on the other hand, seems wholly unfazed by the presence of her collaborators as she rises and falls through her melodies in a typically Bjorkian fashion. The performance is far from phoned in (although, at no point does she seriously open up in the way that only she can) but neither is she bending over backwards like Dirty Projectors seem to be.
There’s something to be said about the artistic billing of this record: Dirty Projectors and Bjork. It felt like Antony Heartgy featured on Bjork’s last album Volta. It felt like David Byrne guested on Dirty Projectors’ track for the Red Hot compilation. By contrast, songs like ‘On and Ever Onward’ or ‘Sharing Orb’ don’t have any closer affiliation to the work of either collaborating artist. Instead, it feels like the product of two artists meeting each other in the middle and creating something that is an exact blend of their individual styles. Nowhere is this more effective than in the closing moments of the recording where Bjork and Longstreth join each other in a duet that is so complimentary and natural that the project transcends concepts of mere collaboration and becomes a musical entity of its own right. This isn’t Dirty Projectors ft. Bjork’ nor is it Bjork ft. Dirty Projectors – it’s Dirty Projectors and Bjork delivering on the promise that such a collaboration suggests.