Dirty Projectors playing outdoors in fifty degree weather which feels like thirty five degrees, in a torrential rainstorm, to a mass of umbrellas, opening for an eagerly anticipated TV On The Radio just as DP are about to, though they haven’t quite done it, break big, have every reason in the world to play a set that fails to click with the audience.
Dirty Projectors, the reigning Presidents of the Brooklyn scene, riding one of the most highly praised albums of the year, playing on a Saturday night at a packed Music Hall Of Williamsburg to an adoring audience have zero reason to put on this rote, boring performance. Dave Longstreth excuses the band with an “a mellower way to spend a Saturday night”. Fuck that shit.
First opening band The Tony Castle are a tone-y baby DP with a multi-talented guitarist also using a mix board and an Ace Tone. The bassist is also the lead singer and he is at his best on the blue redux “Grip On This”. The band need to work on their stage presence and have to bottle the penultimate song “Pirates” a good bass lick they make into a spacey dirge. But I liked em fine.
I more than liked Tune-Yards. One woman, Merril Gerbus, plus a bass player. Gerbus has a ukelele, she bangs on drums, and she has a digital voice recorder she uses to record a vocal hook as she sings it, sings along with her own vocal hook, records the two voices and sings along again. It’s a great move which allows her to not just harmonize with herself but also sound as though she is holding a note ad infinitum. The set is a slow build but twenty seven minutes in she nails it dead and has the crowd in the palm of her hand. Songs like “Sunlight” and “Lions” off her debut album Bird Brain are better live. At the end of one song she plays the only melodic drum solo I’ve ever heard, on several songs Merril begins with vocal ululations that sound Third Worldly but it is a call and response of “YEAH YEAH YEAH” that puts her set over the top and the crowd roars its approval.
Now I’m right by the stage with my friend Steve Diamond and we both loved the set and we both are completely primed for Dirty Projectors. Diamond was also more forgiving the Summer Stage debacle. But it was an inept set and we left after a pretty good “Stillness Is The Movement” an hour and twenty minutes and just before another obscurity.
Has Dave never heard of PACING? Dirty Projectors lacked any -song after song wandered into DP schtick 101: it was all high pitched harmonizing and weird fucking keys. The songs didn’t click so you looked to good moments you had to pull out of context: the jam on “Gimme Gimme Gimme”, Haley Dekle on “Stillness Is The Move” holding down the vocal melody line so vocalist cum guitarist Amber Coffman can improvise a vocal above her, the drummer Brian Mcomber always there so the rest of the band can fuck around however they want to and land back in. And Dave who looks likethe Flintstones pet dinosaur Dino and picking off notes on his left handed guitar.
Dirty Projectors use very intricate arrangements which they copy perfectly from album to stage. But do we go to experimental rock concerts to hear albums being replicated? At this stage in their careers???? Steve was listening to Bitte Orca before the concert and was wondering how they can pull it off live. And here’s the answer. They do so by concentrating very very hard. The problem is the pleasures of watching a band, even one as great as Dirty Projectors, concentrating is limited.
The audience are just waiting to explode and the band is bottling them. They play “Cannibal Resources” two songs in, “Temeculah Sunrise” somewhere mid set -an especially uninspired version. If David Byrne can play to satisfy an audience why can’t the new Dave?
I have done nothing but rave about the Dirty Projectors all year, Bitte Orca is still my fave rock album of the year, but man do they suck live.