By Ben Sinclair
At Bottom of the Hill last Wednesday, Sept. 12, a certain Brooklyn band, sounding a bit like an alchemy of Deerhoof and Prince, provoked what I would break down into three reactions: standing around and enjoying great music (the majority of the audience), sort of dancing (a minority), and lastly, small, isolated, and poor attempts at moshing.
Not that I don’t love the stuff when everyone wants to do it, but the latter tries at this show had to kindly be swatted down. The real success of this band was that they didn’t just provoke – they affected their fans diversely. On these grounds, how could I blame a lonely and intoxicated mosher? I resigned myself to jumping around and dancing inside my own head.
For a band that has been steered towards as many varying focuses as the Dirty Projectors, their name is strikingly apropos. Back when the David Longstreth-led group was showing off their looser, folkier side, the term “rough image” described their projection all too well. As Longstreth threw in classical compositional strategies for strings and voice, the only thing that became any clearer was that the dirt on this projector was not limited to its lens: the whole machine now felt and smelled like a digitized version of some shadowy attic antique, as if the influences of its primary function were sealed in the thin sedimentary layers of dust on its exterior.