I still can’t get my head around Dirty Projectors’ madly growing popularity. Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy a band with such a thorny sound can pack a club like Neumos (I arrived just as the band were walking onstage and instantly hit a solid wall of humanity). But when you break down the group’s component parts, they don’t add up to typical ’00s commercial success (critical plaudits, yes, but those don’t normally lead to rabid, large fan bases).

Led by Dave Longstreth—who strikes me as Generation Y’s David Byrne, right down to the chicken-like head-bobbing and intense, skinny-professor stage demeanor—the New York sextet boast three female singers (Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, Haley Dekle) who “ah” and “oh” with a kind of creamy-white gospel passion, but arranged in rococo, doo-wop configurations. Their and Longstreth’s oft-falsetto’d smart-Caucasian emoting wriggle over quasi-highlife guitar figures and crazily metered, Bill Bruford-esque drumming from Brian Mcomber.

Their songs corkscrew in unexpected directions and defy easy head-nodding, while the melodies similarly move with the unpredictable trajectory of a knuckleball pitch. They often sound like Talking Heads and King Sunny Ade tussling in a Cubist sculpture garden; not exactly a formula for mass popularity, but damn if Dirty Projectors aren’t accruing a steadily growing, seriously receptive audience.

Longstreth came onstage solo to croon while picking left-handed on his right-hander’s guitar (I think the tune was “Like Fake Blood in Crisp October”), a sweet, low-key appetizer before the rest of the band joined him for a sparse, spindly Afropop-inflected piece wherein Dirty Projectors demonstrated their skill for making oblong song structures somehow seem elegant. “No Intention” put forth the group’s trademark halting funk with “Robert Fripp goes to Mali” guitar progressions contrasting with the ultra-white, primly formal vocal gymnastics. “Temecula Sunrise” was all controlled explosions tempered intermittently by a tensely languid lilt (Mcomber was a freakin’ animal on this track).

After a long pause for some guitar restringing, Deradoorian sang the conflicted romantic number “Two Doves” and then Nat Baldwin brought out his standup bass for “Spray Paint (The Walls),” in which they transformed the Black Flag song into a spare, mellow ballad. The one-two-three punch near the end of “Remade Horizon,” “Stillness Is the Move,” and “Useful Chamber” elevated the show to a higher level, with the latter sounding like a lethal combo of “Psycho Killer” and “Take Me to the River,” all stoic menace and exhilarating tension.

The rhythmic and mellifluous “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie” closed the set proper with its hiccupping Laurie Anderson voxing and roller-coaster dynamics, then Dirty Projectors encored with “Fluorescent Half Dome,” a blue-toned, wistful ballad that made me think of Spain (the band, not the country), something I’ve not done in over a decade. The gig ended with the night’s most splenetic track—“Knotty Pine,” I think, a collab with Byrne from the Dark Was the Night compilation.

This set was enjoyable, but somehow it didn’t seem as celebratory and revelatory as the last one Dirty Projectors did at Chop Suey. This tour seems to be going on forever, and it would be nice to hear some new DP material. Nonetheless, the crowd ate it up. Next stop: the Showbox—or maybe even the Paramount, with the way things are going for this lovably odd band.

Photos by Kristen Blush, more after the jump.