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October 26, 2009

Band Comparisons with the Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth... 'the bastard child of Mariah Carey, Steve Reich, and Yes'...

A.V. Club (The Onion) | Read Full Story >

The AV Club:

It’s critical shorthand that everyone (including we) are guilty of falling back on: saying one band “sounds like” another, rather than attempting to get at what makes it unique. And when a band that’s truly idiosyncratic comes along—like Dirty Projectors (playing Antone’s tonight), whose Bitte Orca has received acres of critical adulation this year—that 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. Of course, that hasn’t stopped critics from trying. Here, The A.V. Club collects more than 20 incredibly disparate comparisons that have been employed to describe Bitte Orca’s scratchy, funky art-rock fusion and presents them to leader David Longstreth—who claims he never reads his own reviews—to see if he could make sense of them.



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