Call me ignorant, I’ve been called worse, but the truth is that when the Stillness Is The Move single landed on my doormat, I had no idea who Dirty Projectors were. 'Not interested’ I thought after the first listen. Quite honestly I didn’t think they had much to offer. I then got wind of the album, Bitte Orca, being released on limited edition cassette tape and reconsidered my initial dismissal: Surely if a band can do something as daft and grossly irreverent as release an album on the bastard of all formats, they must have something worthwhile to say.

So when Bitte Orca materialised (thankfully in CD form), I swiftly transferred it to my mp3 player (mp3 being the son of the bastard of all formats), pressed play and was transported, over the course of a thoroughly miserable ten mile bus journey, to somewhere that allowed me the luxury of ignoring the fact that I seemed to be travelling on a mobile psychiatric ward.

Collidoscopic in the extreme, Bitte Orca is a subversively complex record that wraps itself around you and into you like no other recorded work I have come across. Framed by erratic cross-rhythms and twisted together with bold, angular guitar runs, and set against the otherworldly vocal gymnastics of David Longstreth, the peculiar mess that Dirty Projectors make is astounding given the pastoral acoustic starting points that many of the compositions radiate from. Everything is very calculated – it’s designed chaos – and in the same way Captain Beefheart dictated his Magic Band’s unearthly noise, you get the distinct impression that here there’s some mad professor overseeing a class of enthralled children who’ve been let loose with a crate of highlighters in the hope they might create the professor’s masterwork.

Bitte Orca is a joyous, wonderful, mad and infuriating record that begs me to stop doing it the injustice I clearly am with this damn laptop of mine. Thus if you learn nothing else by the end of this somewhat hurriedly thrown-together review, which is an absolute possibility, you shall at least know that you must ensure that you have this record pumping into your ears before long.