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Though I admired the Dirty Projectors’ much-lauded latest album, Bitte Orca, more than I enjoyed it, I decided to check out their first-ever show in Tokyo last March at Club Quattro. I was surprised at the turnout. Despite the hefty amount of press the band had received overseas, the place was hardly sold out, but it was a healthier crowd than what I had been led to believe it would be from the promoter.
Like Sufjan Stevens and Andrew Bird, DP leader David Longstreth is a nominally indie musician who composes with large ensembles in mind. Though not quite as orchestrally ambitious as Stevens, he matches his fellow Brooklynite concept-for-concept in that his albums hold together as fully realized statements on dedicated themes. Under the Dirty Projectors rubric he’s made entire CDs about Don Henley and Black Flag’s Damaged. Bitte Orca is said to be his most “accessible,” but that simply means its more like a standard collection of songs. Longstreth’s soulful vocals are complemented by the harmonies of Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, and their complex vocal interplay is further thickened with switchback time signatures and sudden bursts of dissonance. Music this high-minded isn’t shaped for a standard rock sensibility, but the joy of its making is as infectious as prime funk, which it sometimes resembles in the way it affects the body before it gets processed in the head.
Consequently, the response was more immediate than I would have imagined, owing more to the intensity of the attack than the appeal of the songs themselves, which are, frankly speaking, “difficult” in all nuances of the word. The audience was absolutely sold by the third or fourth number, and even Longstreth, who according to reports rarely demonstrates much crowd empathy on stage, was visibly moved. During a short break to remedy a technical problem he even chatted with everyone in his boyishly unaffected way. “First time in Tokyo,” he said. “What an amazing place.” They did three encores topped with a straightforward cover of Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.” Talk about keeping it difficult.
