1. Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca (‘Useful Chamber’)

Predictability is a dirty word. Bitte Orca is a fantastic album, and the Dirty Projectors make some wonderful sounds (even if they literally mean ‘please, killer whale’). You could play ‘who’s-punk-who’s-not-what’s-the-score’ forever in respect of Rise Above, but every crashing chord in this still reminds me a little bit of London Calling. And you can say it’s overhyped and overrated, or essentially ‘I buy into your critical hegemony but deflate all the scores in order to maintain my authenticity’ - but I really fucking enjoy it, and that’s why this is #1 on my list and Merriweather Post Pavilion is nowhere to be found. That said, I’m going to leave you with the words of someone who can do this far better than me, Bitte Orca according to Martin Douglas -

in nitsuh abebe’s decade in indie column for pitchfork, there’s a passage where the two sides of “indie”– the sloppy, thrashy, unprofessional indie of yore vs. the hyper-musical pop music of today’s indie– are seen as direct points of contention. now, i’m not saying by any means that dirty projectors are sloppy by any means; they’re actually the direct antithesis of the term. it’s just that bitte orca is proof that just because an indie record is well-practiced and hyper-musical, that it doesn’t have to be ponderous and boring. nor does it have to be jarring and slightly annoying just to prove that it isn’t a pop record (sorry, deerhoof). bitte orca IS a pop record, guys. it’s just that the left turns are there to help assert not that bitte orca is of a higher plane than pop records, but that pop records are still capable of surprising people.”

(from the decade in winning: douglas martin’s top 49 records of the 2000’s)

and

“bitte orca’s most revealing moment comes in about halfway through “useful chamber,” right after the buzz and clutter of guitar noise gives way to a passive hi-hat tap: amber coffman, angel deradoorian, and new co-vocalist haley dekle tangle their voices in enraptured three-part harmony, their lyricless vocals ascending almost straight through the sky above them and into the stratosphere, with nothing underneath except a simple beat from a drum pad. with the nihilism that buoyed rise above, the dirty pros’ song-for-song almost-cover of black flag’s damaged, the next logical step was to record an album that expressed vivacious joy. and dave longstreth and his cabal of accomplished musicians have done it here; mixing up vocal-and-beat-driven R&B with knotty art-damage, creating a feel-good album from about as far left-field as one could possibly come from.”

(from the year in winning: douglas martin’s top 20 records of 2009)