culturecrammer

Here is a voice that has had to swim the vast ringing spaces of Simon Cowell’s cynicism in order to reach us.

Perhaps this explains why for much of I Dreamed A Dream Susan Boyle sounds like she is singing in a wind tunnel. This is not helped by the fact that her much-vaunted vocal assets have been heavily treated – pumped up with the studio equivalent of Botox.  It adds to the artificiality of her already mannered vocal technique, which (perhaps at the insistence of her voice coach) consists largely of piling on layer after layer of wobbling vibrato.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a voice here, of sorts.  On rare moments when Boyle relaxes into her natural midrange, you can hear it – a kind of long-breathed warble, with enough power to worry the edges off the custard creams in the church halls of West Lothian.

Contrived it may be, but Boyle’s Elaine-Paige-on-steroids singing style is at least preferable to the nasal histrionic whinnying that now seems compulsory for new pop acts.  The fact that she offers an antidote to the generic urban/RnB template surely goes a long way to explaining Boyle’s staggering popularity.

And there’s another saving grace: Cowell has been merciful – there is no opera here.  Instead the repertory ranges from predictable anthems like the title track, through contemporary stadium-pop and the odd nod to her church roots with the likes of Amazing Grace and Silent Night.

Boyle’s take on Wild Horses, the Jagger/Richards paen to the heaven-and-hell pull of heroin, is downright eerie. There’s even a stilted, bloodless rendition of The Monkee’s Daydream Believer that hooks the song up to an iron lung and drains every last dreg of Pop life out of it.  At times the track order is bizarrely incongruous – one minute Boyle’s going all breathy and Bette Midler on us for Cry Me A River, and the next, she’s wading into a pious rendition of Great Thou Art.

There’s a sort of implied biographical narrative underpinning these song choices, which seem to soundtrack Boyle’s years of thwarted ambition and strangulated passion as she stayed at home to care for her ailing mother.

It’s ironic, then, that Boyle, despite striving for effect to an almost fatiguing degree, seems incapable of investing any of these songs with a scintilla of authentic feeling. This is un-music, manicured with pitiless efficiency by Cowell’s production team, with any vestiges of what might have made Boyle’s singing distinctive carefully airbrushed out of the aural picture.

What I Dreamed A Dream exhibits most powerfully is an overwhelming self-consciousness, a morbid awareness of itself as product.  Even as it insinuates itself into our lives, soundtracking our weddings and work-do’s, this record is harbouring a sneaky secret: it’s not really on our, or the music’s, side at all.

Some landmark records document a giant transformational leap in a band’s development, marking that moment when good artists become great ones.

Bitte Orca is such a record. That it’s also a strange and wayward affair is no surprise coming from a band whose last album, 2007′s Rise Above, was an attempt by frontman Dave Longstreth to remember and reinterpret the entire Black Flag album Damaged after not hearing it for 15 years.  But what makes Bitte Orca special is the way it manages to combine disorientating, mind-flanging weirdness with a joyous, entirely instinctive pop sensibility.

Instantly, listening to opener ‘Cannibal Resource’, it’s as if Dirty Projectors have rearranged rock’s DNA and installed a new songwriting logic. At once strange and familiar, the song offsets its swaggering rock bass and hand-clap percussion with odd time signatures, tangential guitar riffs and vertiginous modulations in pitch. Like the rest of this record, it pulsates with a supreme sense of freedom and confidence.

Things get better still with the gorgeous ‘Temecula Sunrise’, which soars along on the dovetailing Eastern-flavoured harmonies of singers Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, providing the perfect foil to Longstreth’s caustic warble.  Their girl-group vocals see-saw away in the background as dissonant 12-string finger picking meets flurries of fuzzy, amped-up guitar.  This is pop freed of – or rather reconstructing – cliché, throwing us curve balls while simultaneously riffing off classic motifs from rock’s institutional memory.

In fact, tracing the influences in Bitte Orca is like writing tasting notes for a complex wine; every time you delve into it you’ll pick up a hint of something else. ‘The Bride’ has a lilting, water-borne quality that recalls Starsailor-era Tim Buckley. Elsewhere Longstreth, a music composition graduate, drops in jazz, classical, Middle Eastern and African influences, even a touch of 50’s doo-wop.  There are shades of Devendra Banhart, bluesy Led Zep/White Stripes power riffs, the circular grooves of Steely Dan and the voodoo boogie of vintage Captain Beefheart.  But above all this album rings with the influence of Talking Heads, whose David Byrne is a recent Projectors collaborator.

Then, as if to underline their ability to defy categorisation, the Projectors launch into the avant-R’n’B of ‘Stillness Is The Move’, a procession of booty-jiggling pop hooks filtered through something thrillingly alien. With a lyric paraphrasing Peter Handke’s poem from the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, Coffman and Deradoorian’s helium-high vocals ride a Middlle Eastern guitar loop over a glitchy staccato rythmn.  Yearning strings enter the mix as the track builds to a plateau of blissed-out, mystic euphoria. It’s the coolest record Destiny’s Child never made.

This is an album about the longing for transcendence, the state of grace music promises but only delivers in rare glimpses. It’s indie music let off the leash, in which bookish white college kids attain heights of rapture of a kind normally reserved for black soul artists.

More ecstatic word painting follows in ‘Two Doves’, which plays on poetic imagery from the Old Testament text Song of Solomon. Its picked guitar and breathy violin stabs pay loving tribute to Nico’s cover of Jackson Browne’s ‘These Days’ from her album Chelsea Girl, even going so far as to lift a line (“Don’t confront me with my failures…”).  Deradoorian’s vibrato-laden vocal is vulnerable and deeply moving, all the more so for being placed in music that seems to have been mysteriously deconstructed and reassembled.

But it’s on the wildly segueing medley ‘Useful Chamber’ that the Projectors’ sheer reckless verve is at its most jaw-dropping.  A backdrop of morphing synths and chiming, spun-glass guitar is sprayed with sporadic blues riffs; this switches abruptly into a spoken passage, then bursts into a romping chorus plastered in blistering fretwork, before leaping into unearthly vocal modulations that sound like something from another culture, if not another planet. It’s like Ligeti crossed with the Beach Boys.

Old punks might dismiss all this as so much suspect prog-rockery.  But this record is on a relentless quest to transcend its own self-conciousness. The formal experimentation never distracts the music from its main purpose – to communicate urgent, spontaneous joy.

Bitte Orca gloriously reaffirms your faith in pop music’s protean and inexhaustible abilty to reinvent itself, be reborn and live again – even if it has to turn itself inside out to do it.