There's nothing quite like watching a band becoming comfortable with the strength of their own songs, more willing to experiment and throw curveballs to the audience. While Dirty Projectors released Bitte Orca, packed with their most accessible material to date, they still opened their set at the Wilbur Theatre last Monday with "F---ed for Life," a cut from the odds-and-ends New Attitude EP, rewritten to incorporate the voices of Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle instead of the crunchy abrasive electronics of the original.
Despite not being one of their best-known songs, the Projectors swayed the audience with the girls' pinball harmonies and the dynamic between the bubbly verses and the percussive assault of the chorus &- a convincing argument for a new fan to delve into their back catalog. The slinky "No Intention," a standout from Bitte Orca, followed, and the band sank into a groove decorated with angelic harmonies and front man Dave Longstreth's and Coffman's jagged guitars, ringing together. Of course, the band switched it up again with "I Will Truck," from an especially deep cut from concept album The Getty Address, but it was a perfect choice for the band's assured sense of rhythm and interplay.
Percussion was pieced together from sparse drums and a shaker or two, and the girls sang in syncopated unison, imitating the cut-up choral samples from the studio version. The song culminated as half the band alternated chords at a disjointed rhythm with the other half, as Longstreth swung his head from side to side, mirroring the blue and red lights displayed behind them and proving themselves to be always in sync, playing off each other. "Knotty Pine," from last year's Dark Was the Night compilation, was the first song to put Coffman's powerful voice at the forefront, only fleshed out with harmonies during the chorus. Her vibrato seemed wild but controlled, as if always on the verge of coming completely unhinged, and the band roared behind her, one of their peppiest pop songs but cranked way up. "Beautiful Mother," from Björk collaboration Mount Wittenberg Orca, displayed the girls' chops best as they bounced from a complicated unison melody to a fluttering harmony imitating the playing of the whales from whose perspective the girls sang.
Longstreth broke out his acoustic for the two most delicate songs of the night, "Police Story" from their Black Flag-inspired art-damaged album Rise Above and "Two Doves," another cut from Bitte Orca. In this writer's opinion, the Rise Above material should be better represented in their live set, but the spooky police-brutality ballad was perfectly arranged, with the girls imitating the swirling woodwinds from the recorded version and quadrupling the power of Longstreth's busy melodies. The rest of the band left just Deradoorian and Longstreth on stage for the smoky "Two Doves," a sort of twisted take on the Jackson Browne classic "These Days," but with Longstreth's complicated playing repeatedly throwing away and picking up the rhythm again. "Temecula Sunrise" brought the full band back on stage and featured a similar manipulation of rhythm, with the girls adding vocals in even more places, and a bizarrely funky take on Bob Dylan's "As I Went Out One Morning" set spiky drums against sparse guitar and the girls' unified, almost synth-like vocals.
Imagine It" was another surprise, as Longstreth and Coffman coiled a complicated back and forth riff against constantly changing drums for a frenetic clockwork. "Stillness is the Move," the band's breakthrough hit, sounded a little strange here, as Longstreth kept the guitar so skeletal as to add little to the song, but the girls were, of course, spot-on. "Useful Chamber" displayed the band at all their strengths, with a danceable chorus and woozy harmonies anchoring Longstreth's lovelorn lyrics, and "Cannibal Resource" found them at their sunniest, with additional vocals from the girls adding punctuation to Longstreth's cryptic lines.
They closed with "Rise Above," with one of the band's most memorable and triumphant melodies, sort of Dirty Projectors distilled to their core elements. With so much strong material and such fascinating reinvention, this is a live band to see over and over; nearly every song is a highlight, and there's no telling what additions, subtle or significant, the band will make over the course of their career. Longstreth noted toward the end of the set that it was nights like that one that made being on tour for so long worth it. They'll always get a warm welcome in Boston with such a memorable live show.
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