Almost perfect, the remnants of smoke from an earlier brush fire hung eerily across the sky, illuminated, as if a harbinger of things that awaited that evening. The Dirty Projectors took the stage, opening with “Two Doves,” a tune sung solely by one-quarter of the band’s female vocal arrangement, Angel Deradoorian—serving as a perfect swan dive into the band’s repertoire—softly savoring each note as it left her lips. If there is a breakout year for the DPs, it’s got to be 2009. It feels in part due to fact of the critics who, en masse, tend to pigeonhole the group’s recent release, Bitte Orca, as the band’s “most accessible” to date. However, if you were in the audience on this particular Wednesday, the body of work performed indeed struck me as nothing more than the most natural evolution for the group. What occurred that night can best be described as an explosion of complicated beauty that unfolded before us like watching fireworks poolside from the international space station. I had every intention, with notebook in hand, of paying close attention to each technical detail, to every riff tinged with worldly sounding roots employed by Dave Longstreth—echoed by Amber Coffman’s own accompaniment to the vocal gymnastics she put forth along with Deradoorian and recent addition Haley Dekle. I wish I had better words for each member’s abilities, truth be told. But I ended up completely losing my shit that night as the band seemed to strike the main vein. I was overcome to the point where all I could do was bust into my best truffle shuffle and badly sing along with each harmony. It’s what I’d imagine Grateful Dead fans felt like in the ’80s (no irony). I was nothing but powerless.

—Gab Chabran