Many bands claim to sound like "nothing else out there" but usually they offer little more than a slight variation on whatever the genre du jour may be.

Clearly, bands like this cannot have heard of Dirty Projectors, a Brooklyn-based boy/girl quartet bursting with character, invention and sensational musicianship.

Theirs was a complex, exotic sound that drew on Afro Beat's clipped guitar lines and mixed it with plunging dubwise basslines and intermittent blasts of furious, white-knuckle guitarring. They deftly mixed the soulful with the cerebral; the girls' R'n'B-eqsue backing vocals provided the perfect counterpoint to frontman Dave Longstreths' strangulated croon.

The hour-long set was akin to getting lost in some kind of musical Aladdin's cave; thoroughly disorientating but magical and hugely rewarding at every turn.