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“Cannibal Resource” – Dirty Projectors
(Words/music: David Longstreth, available on Bitte Orca, Domino 2009) 

David Longstreth’s interview with the Onion A.V. Club was one of my favorite pieces from 2009.  In it, Sean O’Neal fed Longstreth pull quotes comparing the Dirty Projectors’ most recent album to other bands.  Longstreth gives some interesting responses to a few of them (and in the process reveals that he’s the type of guy who refers to other musicians as “cats”), but most of the more ridiculous ones he brushes off with various degrees of disgust and amusement.   It’s an amusing read, but it also underscores the hollowness of criticism that only describes bands in terms of the other people that it sounds like, as Longstreth’s answers to some of the more ridiculous claims better describe his band’s sound than the writers who coined these absurd comparisons.

O’Neal’s introduction to the piece sums up the reviewer’s conundrum: “[T]hat old music-reviewer standby becomes especially worthless, as everyone scrambles to find a way to describe something that, speaking honestly, sounds like nothing that came before it.”  Bitte Orca combines so many different types of sounds that it’s impossible to describe all of them (and shows the folly of “spotting” a couple of them and generalizing these similarities to the entire album).  It almost makes more sense to talk about the songs as a series of juxtapositions – be it abrupt turns in a different direction or an unusual combination of sounds.  “Cannibal Resource” cycles through a series of sounds – the underwater sounding guitar in the opening, the wordless female vocals, a 12-string acoustic guitar joined by an electric guitar – with Longstreth’s unconventional vocals.  The song starts by cycling through each of these once before the layers start to bleed together – soon a stray “oooooh” cuts through the guitar lines, punctuated by a laboriously strummed chord on the acoustic guitar.  “Cannibal Resourse” lays out the plan for the rest of the album by introducing some of the key players – specifically, how these players (the female vocalists, Longstreth’s guitar, the syncopated percussion) take on different roles and serve different purposes throughout the rest of the album.

More on Dirty Projectors: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm