[dirty]
I went to go see this show much more for the Dirty Projectors than for TV On the Radio, and it is only for that reason that I didn't come away totally disappointed. It was one of those rare nights when the opener just totally blows away the headliner. It's not that I don't like TVOTR -- I do. I dig their grittier first two albums much more than their poppy latest, Dear Science. It's just that their live act had serious problems, which may have had more to do with the venue than anything else. And because I don't really want to talk about TVOTR too much, I'll make it brief: The sound was all off. It was just a wall of mid-tone fuzz and noise that was completely uninteresting and obscured virtually everything subtle about TVOTR's music, including Tunde Adebimpe's and Kyp Malone's certainly very interesting voices. A few songs, including "Dancing Shoes" and "Staring At The Sun" were presented as bang-it-out punk songs, and the crowd was really into it, which was fun, but others, including "Crying," were just crowded, sound-wise, to the point of incoherence. I wasn't offended by this show. I was just so uninterested I kinda wanted it to be over, the whole time.
Now to the main point. The Dirty Projectors, a Brooklyn sextet led by Dave Longstreth, are, along with Deerhoof, probably the most challenging and interesting rock band I've heard in years. That is, their music exists within a largely conventional rock context, but constructs songs that are chordally, harmonically and structurally alien to any genre I know of. TDP play a sort of shuddering, disjointed music, with Longstretch strumming an electric guitar with fingerpicks while singing in a tortured, back-of-the-throat high range about love and weirder things. Each riff he plays sounds random, kaleidescopic -- as though improvised without thought to completing a musical phrase or fitting its rhythm into any sort of box. But then you realize that they're not random; they're highly composed riffs that he can return to, verbatim, later in songs, and that fit deftly into the overall picture of what the band is doing.
His abrupt guitar and vocal utterings are cushioned on one side by absolutely incredible vocal harmonies by Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle, and punctuated by unpredictable drum kit outbursts. Angel Deradoorian, a freakishly young-looking guitarist, keyboardist, and honey-throated singer, adds atmospherics. The whole thing bridges the gap between indie rock, West African pop (via Langstreth's cascading guitar licks) and Charles Ives-ish spastic avant-garde classical compositions.
Imagine how hard that must be to replicate live.
Just as one stand-alone example, the song "Remade Horizon," from their new record (released two days ago) Bitte Orca, takes a side-trip mid-song so that Coffman and Dekle can sing alternating two-note 16th-note phrases without missing a beat, so that the effect is something like a 12-tone bird song. Then Langstreth comes in with a guitar solo that mirrors their parts. Then Nat Baldwin somehow locates a bass line that compliments this, and Brian McComber continues to freak out on the drum set. I was really curious how they were going to do this one live. Whether they would even attempt the vocal acrobatics. They did, not once, but twice. They added a vocal bird-twitter part at the beginning of the song, too, only to revisit it again at the end. It was unbelievable. It made my hands shake to watch it -- that's how good it was.
"Stillness is a Move," the so-called "right at home on R&B radio" single from Bitte Orca (it's not that at all, that article is terrible) took the form of a demented Mariah Carrie song when performed live. Langstreth is off to the side, awkwardly scratching out the song's bagpipe-like descant, while McComber hits out a hip-hop beat and Coffman prances about the stage singing stilted, poperatic lines about love. I didn't really like this song on record, but live it was stirring.
The rest of the set I can't write specifically about, because I don't know the album well enough to name songs. But in general, I think that's a problem not easily overcome. It's damn near impossible to hum the melody of a Dirty Projectors song or sing along with it. Langstreth's singing is melismatic and intense. The overall vibe is jerky and loud. But for a band that I wasn't sure could pull off their compositions on a stage in front of a big crowd, this performance just blew me away.
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