Never Enough Notes e-zine // reviews + interviews + music

The first thing you’re going to notice about this collaberation is the sheer sparseness of  the arrangements. All Björk and Dirty Projectors have given themselves to work with are acoustic guitar, some very understated bass, so-subtle-you’d-almost-miss-it synths and vocal harmonies, though the resulting sound is a very complex, multi-layered one.

The EP of 7 tracks is a concept album sung from the perspectives of a pod of orcas (sung by Björk and Projectors’ chorus trio) and one seemingly very isolated human (sung by the Projectors’ auteur David Longstreth). And if there is one part of this album which really shines, it’s the vocals. As complex interplays of vocal harmonies crest and break over the listener in a pleasantly whale-like way.

The whimiscal choice of subject for the album, however, does the vocal talents no favours, as the lyrics frequently decend into saccharine idealism and the niéve song style gets quite grating after a while. “Beautiful mother up ahead of us, can you see us play inside the waves” is one such line. It was, for me, too cringeworthy to quite bear, and the overall pro-nature/anti-whaling message of the thing, whilst good, is treated in such a starry-eyed way that it could almost have been written by a 9-year old who has just learned about environmental damage. Yes David, we get it, whales are nice, humans do bad things to nature, well done.

The  feeling I get from this album is, sadly, simply “meh” – I can’t fault the musicianship, but the overall effect is somewhat underwhelming. It’s like if Heston Blumenthal cooked you dinner and all you got was a bacon sandwich. There’s nothing wrong with a bacon sandwich, but you would have expected more. Ultimately, it’s a nice album to listen to in the bath, but its not much to write home about, though I fully expect it to turn up in some sickeningly quirky hipster film sooner or later.

5/10