Pop music has made various attempts to connect with African music. Paul Simon did it. Sting's tried it. Damon Albarn has also given it a whirl with his Mali Music project. More recently, Baba Maal, Tinariwen and Amadou & Mariam have been making a big impact beyond the usual world music fanbase.
Meanwhile, Vampire Weekend have been doing their best to introduce African beats and rhythms to the ipods, radios and speaker systems of the indie brigade on both sides of the Atlantic.

Dirty Projectors have a similar agenda. Their latest album, Bitte Orca is the band's fifth outing and is full of experimental pop filled with influences from the African continent.

It's a mixed bag of a record, more a collection of musical ideas that a fully defined album. The musical styles fluctuate between Beyonce-ish RnB in the lead single Stillness is the Move and a lo-fi indie experiment in soundscapes in Useful Chamber. The latter improves with repeated listens, but suffers from such terrible gratingly out of tune ooh-ings and ah-ings from the backing vocal that it will actually hurt your brain.

In between these two points of reference, soul and indie, there is Two Doves? which features not so much of a nod of the head in the direction of Nico's These Days as a full frontal bear hug of that songs accompaniment.

The problem with Bitte Orca is that it seems to be a little too sure of itself. It?s a daddy-look-what-I-can-do record, crammed with as many disconnected ideas as possible: freeform jazz, random German words and atonal experimentalism along with nonsensical song titles (Stillness is the Move, Fluorescent Half Dome and Useful Chamber).

While there is nothing wrong with any one of these ideas or concepts, the seeming random splash of all of these ideas thrown into one album is a little disconcerting. It is not an easy album to like.

After forcing myself to listen to this album forsaking any other music for the best part of a week bits of the record (sections of Useful Chamber and the instrumental parts of Fluorescent Half Dome) are beginning to grow on me. But this may be a rare case of musical Stockholm Syndrome.

Albums should not be this difficult to like. Although there are records deserving of the description growers out there, there cannot be enough time in the average music lover's life to cultivate an intense love affair (or even a fling) with this album.

By Stephen Morris

Rating: 5/10
Format: Album
Release Date: Out Now
Record Label: Domino Records
www.myspace.com/dirtyprojectors