Live Review: Dirty Projectors, Atlas Sound @ The EARL, July 17
Dirty Projectors arrived late, during Atlas Sound’s set on The EARL’s welcoming stage. They’d driven straight to Atlanta from Louisiana, they told us, and more than one band member was sick. In a gesture of goodwill, the audience agreed to put out cigarettes for their benefit.
Fortunately, the smokes were the only things extinguished. Bradford Cox’s set as Atlas Sound had been a glowing one. Backed by Herb Harris, Jason Harris and Tommy Chung of The Selmanaires, he gigglingly played a handful of tracks from the forthcoming Logos for his hometown crowd. It was the first Atlas Sound show I’ve seen where he had a backing band — one that learned the songs in two days, no less — rather than just a microphone and a sampling board at his fingertips. Cox will take The Selmanaires on tour with him when he hits the road this October.
[Atlas Sound: Bradford Cox and Tommy Chung]
The headliners’ set was no less luminescent. Consisting of almost the entirety of this year’s Bitte Orca, it opened with “Two Doves,” just vocalist Angel Deradoorian singing and band leader Dave Longstreth on guitar. It was a sweet, captivating way to start, and ensured the audience’s undivided attention. The set was peppered with moments that would make us stare equally as rapturously.
[Dirty Projectors: Angel Deradoorian, Dave Longstreth, Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle]
Standout moments included the rocking unison “bitte orca” refrain in “Useful Chamber” and the guitar riff and handclap backing in “No Intention.” Longstreth almost never strums his guitar, always finger picking these frantic, stuttering melodies and looking ecstatic the whole time. Deradoorian, Haley Dekle and Amber Coffman’s voices ping-pong-ed off each other’s in such a way that it was seamless, and difficult to believe it was human anatomy and not an electronic device producing the sound (most startlingly in “Remade Horizon”)...[Read more]
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