Yips and Riddles

The art of musical hiccups.

In 2007, for Dirty Projectors’ fifth full album, “Rise Above,” the group’s leader, David Longstreth, composed, from memory, a new version of “Damaged,” Black Flag’s 1981 album, radically altering both the lyrics and the music. “I listened to ‘Damaged’ a lot as a teen-ager in middle school,” Longstreth told me recently. “I loved it to pieces, and then moved on. I didn’t listen to it for about ten years.” The Black Flag album is a series of constrained, desperate punk songs that push the emotional and physical capabilities of the band. The singer, Henry Rollins, barks about depression, cops, and other obstacles to teen-age happiness: “Thirsty and miserable, always wanting more.” “Damaged” is a cry from misfits. Longstreth’s “Rise Above” is a block of swirling music made to suit another kind of misfit, not necessarily an anxious one. It was helpful to be told up front that “Rise Above” was related to Black Flag’s “Damaged,” because it would have taken me ages to hear one album in the other.

Longstreth, who was a music major at Yale, is not interested in making things easy for his listeners, but he’s not a tease. The band’s latest effort, “Bitte Orca,” is a coherent, meaty album that makes his language so clear that I’ve been able to go back and use it to translate the band’s earlier work. I was drawn to “Rise Above” because of its confidence and its wild curlicues. That didn’t mean that I could always find a way in. The main elements of Dirty Projectors albums were there: Longstreth’s voice, which tends toward a convulsive yip; his guitar playing, which renders tricky patterns in a fluid way that doesn’t blur the edges; and several female voices, hovering, sometimes in harmony, sometimes cracking a song into bits. There are echoes of various African guitar styles in Longstreth’s playing, though none stick around long enough to lay a specific claim. Like Hendrix, Longstreth is a lefty who plays a right-handed Strat upside down. Despite the oddness of his songs, he plays in standard tuning.

Longstreth employs a method for arranging voices known as hocketing, which stretches back to the work of thirteenth-century French monks. To hocket, you split up a melody or a chord and assign the notes to different voices. (It’s like an advanced version of those “Sesame Street” segments where Muppets individually say the syllables of a word and then combine to say the entire word together.) When voices begin to hocket (the word is related to “hiccup”), the sound starts to flicker and pop, as if the chords and melodies were multiplying like soap bubbles. (Hocketing is the mirror ball of arranging.) The effect is most striking live. There’s your band, standing still, but the music is rotating all over the stage.

“Rise Above” is so dense with leaps and left turns that it can seem algebraic: something demanding your full attention, best undertaken episodically, and not for long. “Bitte Orca” distributes Longstreth’s style over a flatter surface, and hands over many of the vocals to the three remarkable women in his band: the guitarist and singer Amber Coffman, the singer and keyboardist Angel Deradoorian, and the singer Haley Dekle. That may be the secret here—an entire album of Longstreth’s singing is perhaps more challenging than any of his other moves. Although earlier Dirty Projectors albums are stocked with rhythm, “Bitte Orca” is the first to sound as if it had a traditional rhythm section—the fabulously heavy drummer Brian Mcomber and the bassist Nat Baldwin.

“Cannibal Resource” opens the album with an easeful blast, a careful step into Longstreth’s mandarin ways. Unaccompanied, Longstreth plays a series of small, torqued-up chords through tremolo and a phaser. We could be anywhere at this point—there’s no telling what continent we’re going to land on when everyone else shows up. Baldwin sneaks into the chords with intermittent flashes of bass, and then Mcomber enters with a straight backbeat. For once, Longstreth’s chords sound like ordinary rock-and-roll fifths; this is about as close to normalcy as the band gets. But the scene switches quickly, even when the time signature is straight. In ninety seconds, we go full circle. Longstreth is singing high, but smoother than before: “Look around at everyone. Everyone looks alive and waiting.” A moment later, he sings, “We are still counting on cannibal resource.” (Like people?) The women sing above and around Longstreth—“ah-ah” and “oh-eh” and “eh-oh”—and make a shiny backdrop behind his sword-waving voice. Chords come in clumps of acoustic and electric sound lashed together. Longstreth can spin out lines and counterlines easily, and the lyrics suggest that he is a problem solver, not a crowd-pleaser. Slightly rearranged, though, the spiralling melodies and the sharp tones become generous and inviting. Longstreth’s detail and his variation are no longer a riddle built for one; “Bitte Orca” turns all that technique and compositional brawn toward the audience.

Live, the band sometimes wanders back to the abstract side of the street. Maybe this is a by-product of having a single, demanding composer leading a band. (Rehearsals are apparently quite long.) Longstreth is over six feet tall, and slightly stooped. The eccentricity of the music is not reflected in his speech or in his movements. He and the three women maintain an odd sort of calm that sometimes reads as disdain or distance, though it’s probably simply concentration.

This summer, on the Williamsburg waterfront, the band played a set with unusually good sound in near-perfect weather. The audience was quiet and respectful. The band easily pulled off the tricky back-and-forth singing of “Remade Horizon,” a glorious song that moves from a lilting opening, in which Longstreth sings about a “back yard” and a “residential neighborhood,” into a series of bright and rowdy vocal tennis matches among all four voices. Even so, I found myself not lifting off with the band.

Back in my apartment, though, “Bitte Orca” just got better. Though it easily repays listening, it is still as layered and restless as Longstreth’s earlier work. You don’t get easy verse-chorus-verse patterns, or any of those conveniences of pop-song form that allow a performer to go a little nuts and let muscle memory bring back the chords. Songs do repeat motifs and sections, but often with so many variations that you never seem to pass the same corner twice. Longstreth’s material is riddled with information, and I often end up closing my eyes when the album is on. I generally react physically to intense music, but Dirty Projectors make me happiest when I don’t. (“Stillness Is the Move” is not just a song title—it’s a suggested usage.) Just as the album format is being nudged to the economic sidelines, “Bitte Orca” pushes back and says, “Sit. Stay. Listen.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the November 23, 2009, issue.

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