Concert Review: Dirty Projectors at the Granada (video-enhanced)

BY IAN HRABE

Right before Dirty Projectors went on, I overheard someone on the balcony talking about the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. Talking Heads come up a lot when people talk about Dirty Projectors, enough that now they are being heralded as the heir apparent to art pop. And with good reason, too.

Like Heads frontman David Byrne, Dave Longstreth works with complex song structures and experimental-leaning arrangements to craft what are essentially artsy pop songs. After toiling away for years and touting a discography featuring a “glitch opera” about Don Henley and a reworking of Black Flag’s Damaged LP from memory, Longstreth has achieved his magnum opus with Dirty Projectors latest record, Bitte Orca, and brought almost all of those songs with him to the Granada last night.

One element of Dirty Projectors sound that makes them so unique is Longstreth’s guitar work, and after watching him play I realized how he achieves this: He approaches the guitar like someone who has never seen one in use. He’d modified a right handed Stratocaster so it appeared as if he was playing the guitar upside down, which only added to the effect. On top of this, both of his hands looked like those of someone pretending to play the guitar. His fingers were all over the place, yet somehow every note fit perfectly, like in a John Coltrane sax solo.