Dirty Projectors’ recent cover of Usher’s “Climax” didn’t exactly, ahem, do it for us, but the New York art-rock posse did score some points, via guffaws, for their contribution to the Portlandia bands Featherwash and Bless the Barn. That said, it was almost comfort food-y to witness the group return to their usual gloriously spare and harmonic form for Conan last night, where bathed in blue they unspooled their arena guitar-kissed, creepily themed “Offspring Are Blank.” That one, of course, hails from the DPs’ magnificent Swing Lo Magellan, “an album that leaves the sidewinding R&B of 2009’s Bitte Orca for real, rope-a-dope troubadoubery” — so said us when we dubbed the thing the 23rd best album of 2012. So, like, booya.
