Some people just march to the beat of a different drummer. David Longstreth, benign dictator of Brooklyn art darlings Dirty Projectors, is in thrall to one who sounds as if they have six arms – a kind of Hindu deity trying to play to a sticking click track.
Longstreth and his six-strong band are spooling out See What She Seeing, a love song from their latest album, July's Swing Lo Magellan, to a sold-out crowd. It's regulated, more or less, by one thin swish from the drummer, plus the sound of knucklebones falling down wooden stairs, the wayward wooze of Longstreth's own vocal melody and some drum pad patterns. Nevertheless, there are girls at the sides of the audience, dancing – some to the swish, some to the singing, some even to the knucklebones. Everyone else is riveted to the spot.
Seven albums old, Dirty Projectors are brimming with these fiendish trigonometric grooves and much else besides to furrow the brow of even the most cerebral music lover. They are heroes to the kind of people for whom tricksy jazzers Radiohead are just bland arena rock.
Longstreth's guitar lines shimmer, most often, from the heat of West Africa; you can tell he heard Talking Heads at a formative age. But Longstreth is on a mission to sound like nothing else around, daring people to keep up. Frequently the Projectors' three astounding female vocalists will sing harmonies that start out like early church music, slide into calculated atonality (as on Wittenberg IV) and end up as girl-group R&B. That they do so while playing guitar (Amber Coffman), keyboards (Olga Bell) and drum pads (Haley Dekle) is just another reason to gawp, open-mouthed, at Dirty Projectors' prowess. They really are amazing.
Hilariously, Swing Lo Magellan, from which tonight's set is largely drawn, is billed as Dirty Projectors' most accessible album. The recently released 20-minute long-form video that accompanies it, however, retains the band's signature "whuh?" factor, one formed over roughly a decade. Bitte Orca, their 2009 effort, hauled the Projectors into the spotlight, after years of blog buzz celebrating Longstreth's high-concept projects.
The most entertaining of these warm-ups was 2007's Rise Above, in which the Projectors on duty at the time reimagined punk band Black Flag's Damaged – from memory. Needless to say, the DPs embroidered wildly on the original songs, creating chamber pop chorales where before there were brutalist shoutalongs. Subsequent stints with David Byrne and Björk confirmed the Projectors as prime movers in the Brooklyn art-rock renaissance.
Swing Lo Magellan, though, adds songs about basic things such as love and fear to Longstreth's canon of wilful density. There are tunes that even cleave close to convention. They open tonight with the title track, a gentle lope that imagines the Portuguese explorer setting off into the unknown.
At times it's as though Longstreth is trying to be superficial for sport. If there's a brave shampoo company out there in need of an advert soundtrack, it needs look no further than The Socialites – sung by the long-tressed Coffman – which goes on and on about how lovely a girl's hair is.
Showmanship isn't an entirely alien concept to Dirty Projectors. Longstreth's guitar solo on No Intention has the joyous stuff of rock piggery to it. But their live show remains a frustrating spectacle. Longstreth, as should be clear by now, is the sort of creative who doesn't suffer fools gladly. The album's promotional campaign was studded with interviews in which he just bristled, hating the repetitiveness of it all. He is not the type to privilege entertainment, or even showmanship, over the inspiration of awe.
But music is by nature repetitive, and over the course of an hour and a half you long for a groove to settle. You want to love them as well as admire them, but it's like trying to hug a porcupine.
The gig's die-for moments occur when the lights on stage come up and blaze brightly, in tandem with Coffman, Dekle and Bell's harmonies, if that's what we should call them. The vocals on Gun Has No Trigger and Useful Chamber aren't girly folk trills by any stretch. They blare, gloriously, like trumpets; the lights scorch your eyes as their voices oversaturate your ears.
