Sweder's impression: Dirty Projectors having their pre-gig meal at Cookie.

Dirty Projectors
Venue: Hi-Fi Bar & Ballroom, Melbourne

“Are they like Vampire Weekend?” my fellow Enthusiast Andrew asked me at Golden Plains.
“No,” I replied with hipsterish annoyance.

But as they began to play in the rain on Sunday, I realised that Dirty Projectors kind of are. They’re ‘like’ a lot of other things, actually, and it’s a bit of a game to describe them. Frontman Dave Longstreth has been compared to David Byrne, with whom the band collaborated on ‘Knotty Pine’. At Golden Plains, a friend of mine mused that they were “deconstructing Motown”, and tonight, another friend observed that vocalist Amber Coffman reminded her of Björk, with whom Dirty Projectors have also played, and whose ‘Hyperballad’ Longstreth has ululatingly covered.

Even Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, a former Dirty Projectors touring member, has had a go: concluding in 2003 that “Dave Longstreth is making his own fucked-up version of American music” and, more recently, vacillating between “Led Zeppelin deconstructed” and “’60s folk-pop re-imagined”.

For me, it took seeing Dirty Projectors live to realise that their finger-plucked, capo-clamped guitars and bouncy bass reminded me of African pop. Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle thrill tonight’s crowd with cuckoo-like syncopated cries that sound deliberately uncanny, otherworldly. The complex harmonic arrangements, coupled with the almost gutteral abandon with which the trio can shift gears from soft crooning to strident fortissimos (notably, on ‘Useful Chamber’) remind me of Bulgarian-style a capella… which, in turn, reminds me of my teenage years in a right-on, all-female choir called the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble.

So my conclusion about Dirty Projectors – for what it’s worth – is that they’re hipster Ivy-Leaguers dismantling other cultures’ musical markers of identity and authenticity, and reassembling them as something that’s hard to pin down, but impossible to mistake.

Evelyn Morris has turned Pikelet from a solo recording project into a band, and opens the gig with a far louder, more powerful and elaborate set than anything I’d heard from her before. Stylistically, Pikelet is a great fit for Dirty Projectors; they share an interest in simple but surprising vocal lines, lush harmonies and multi-layered arrangements. I liked her first, self-titled album but felt it was sometimes a little too twee; tonight, I loved the ballsier Pikelet sound. Well worth checking out Morris’s more recent release Not So Still.

Then it’s the main event, and the three lady vocalists absolutely nail the opening harmonies on relatively new track, the Afro-pop-tinged ‘Ascending Melody’. Next is ‘Remade Horizon’ from last year’s much-approved-of album Bitte Orca. Longstreth’s falsetto is fascinating to hear live: it seems perilously close to warbling totally out of control, but somehow he keeps it on track. He also has a goofy giggle that makes people in the crowd – including me – laugh, too.

They segue into the stomping ‘No Intention’, which makes the audience go mental. The monstrous drums on this song make me think a mashup with Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Fix Up, Look Sharp’ is in order. Indeed, the pop- and R&B-tinged songs, most of all ‘Stillness Is The Move’, are the real crowd-pleasers – but they make the uneven sound mix immediately obvious. It must be pretty tricky to balance so many vocal lines, especially when there’s so much dynamic variation, but sometimes Longstreth is drowned out by the backing vocalists, and Coffman’s vocals in ‘Stillness Is The Move’ are sometimes barely audible.

In the middle of the set, full of older material (’Spray Paint The Walls’, ‘Fucked For Life’) and noodly ballads, people shift restlessly and push to the back for drinks and ciggie breaks. The exception is ‘Two Doves’. Alone on stage, Longstreth on guitar and Deradoorian on vocals deliver an unassumingly perfect version that soars above its embarrassing lyrics (“Your cologne is really fragrant”; “Your two eyes are like two doves”) to captivate the crowd.

Actually, I quite like that Dirty Projectors aren’t afraid of silences, both in their songs and between them. “At this point in the show we like to call for a minute’s silence,” deadpans Deradoorian. (”That was a joke,” she has to add, when the audience goes respectfully quiet.) But when I think of all the bombastic rock and electro acts I’ve seen at the Hi-Fi, cramming the space with sound, it’s novel and refreshing to come here for these relatively sparse arrangements.

The main set finishes with ‘Useful Chamber’, but the band eventually return, sans drummer, for an encore of two songs. First up, a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine’. Longstreth seems to be deliberately adopting Dylan’s mannerisms, but I’m enjoying the unadorned backing harmonies – appropriately, they sound like old-fashioned folk gospel. The last Melbourne sees of Dirty Projectors is a song they’d written for Björk, full of vocal acrobatics: ‘When The World Comes To An End’.