TO HELLA WITH IT

For New Yorkers, taking only one subway train to one’s destination is a point of pride. Transferring to another train is a compromise. But taking three different trains is just plain humiliating. Nonetheless, I recently swallowed my straphanger’s pride and took the F to the L to the G to see three zeitgeisty bands spin dysfunction into gold in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.

The show was at Club Europa, normally a cheesy upstairs discoteque for Polish-American Tony Maneros.

First up: Who’s Your Favorite Son God, two ectomorphic guitarists framing an Ewok drummer-singer, from Sacramento. They play mercurial, messy, odd-metered music – it reminds me of peering at a baby’s face and watching how it flits through a broad range of expressions, like it’s demoing its emotional software. The effect is only heightened by the high, plaintive keening which emits from somewhere within the drummer’s beard. Think Band of Horses having an anxiety attack.

The drummer says something about how they’ll miss the Dirty Projectors on the next leg of the tour and then, apparently realizing he may have dissed the replacement band, gets really flustered and begins sputtering, finally managing to say, “God, I wish I didn’t have opinions,” his voice dripping with sincere self-loathing. So many of the people in and around this type of music seem damaged and neurotic. It makes me wonder whether, as musicians so often are, they are the canaries in the coal mine. The disparity of the luxury and peace of their immediate lives and the atrocious corruption and carnage everywhere else must be a lot to bear for younger people. This has probably been said for untold generations, but it makes me wonder whether the world really has finally become too fast, complicated and crazy for kids to handle, that the limit has at last been reached. This music certainly sounds like it.

It’s exciting to get in on the ground floor of a band. In fact, for better or worse, the entire music blog world is founded on that very fact. It’s a musical futures market — rotisserie baseball, but with rock bands. The winner gets a whole bunch of cred, blogroll adds, and a date with James Murphy. I’ll join in and go on record as saying that the Dirty Projectors bear watching.

Lead singer-guitarist Dave Longstreth leads the band almost like a cult leader, putting the rest of the band (female singer-guitarist, female singer-bassist, non-singing dude drummer) through knotty, willful contortions, which they negotiate with consummate grace and energy. Taut funk drained of sex and swagger, it is truly modern music: inventive, cosmopolitan and thoroughly of its time. The odd meters and odder singing (Longstreth’s weird Plastic Man crooning, the band’s three-part “Batman”-by-way-of-B-52′s harmonies and uncanny vocal rhythm tricks) pre-empt any commerciality, keeping this music tribal. Often they go in for impossibly long arpeggiated, intertwining guitar lines, and it’s just fascinating, like soukous and mbaqanga interpreted by a music composition major. It winds up sounding like Prince fronting late King Crimson.

Being the ’80s indie maven that I am, I dug the fractured cover of Black Flag’s “Police Story,” a most apropos tune in this post-2003 Republican National Convention city — in fact, that very day, revelations emerged about the NYPD’s dubious surveillance of groups planning to protest at the RNC.

Up until now, their live thing, like their albums, had been inconsistent, to put it mildly – Longstreth needs to figure out how to edit himself. But the shows have gradually been coalescing, zeroing in on the best songs, modifying arrangements, tightening from plentiful road-testing with a steady line-up. The Dirty Projectors are growing into their once-distant promise like an adolescent finally growing into an oversized set of hands.

Then it was Hella‘s turn. Invariably, when a drummer does a line-check – making sure all the mikes are working just before the set starts – it’s just a perfunctory roll around the drums and a few bars of a basic beat on kick, hi-hat and snare. Not with Hella’s Zach Hill. Out of nowhere, a stunning sound came off the stage – a frenetic pummeling, like three drummers all soloing madly at once. But it was just one guy. Astounding. People’s jaws dropped. And the music hadn’t even started yet. Hella proceeded to melt faces with stunning ensemble playing, daredevil chops delivered at insane velocity, knottiest, most brain-busting cascades of riffs, like Trout Mask Replica at quadruple speed, joyously abandoning the lockstep precision of chops-intensive bands such as Don Caballero or Battles for a free-jazzy looseness that makes the music organic and human, even in the weirdest time signatures.

I could do without their superfluous Eugene Mirman lookalike singer, who couldn’t face the audience and could only manage the obligatory “Hey New York, how ya doing” by closing his eyes and affectedly running his hands through his hair. Dude, if you’re going to be a frontman, be a frontman.

Hella summons up the same feelings of rapid information and whiplash disorientation that the other two bands did. They’ve just developed an even more superhuman technique to express, embrace and master it. If these bands are the sound of dysfunction, it’s an incredible testimony to the resilience of the human spirit and the redemptive power of music. I haven’t had such a great night out in a long time.