Dirty Projectors - Rise Above

The Best of 2007: Part Eight

Complexity isn't a vice.

I have a very hard time remembering that sometimes. I heard the Dirty Projectors about a year and a half ago and I was a little more than baffled. I couldn't help thinking about all the art school kids that were so stoked on this sound: a dense, musical vocal exercise with uncommon instruments and standard instruments being played in a very unique way. When I heard about Dave Longstreth's new conquest, I was way intrigued. A reimagined version of a Black Flag classic, reconstructed completely from memory? Hm. It was going to have to be damn good, I decided, because at the rate tribute albums, re-releases and reunions are happening, I'm going to have to completely write off music in the next few years. All in all, the story seemed too good to be true, and yet, there it was being pumped directly into my head.

Longstreth has recorded one of the most interesting albums of the year. Since the album was reconstructed from memory, it is vastly different than the original outside of the general "sound." The songs are much longer; Damaged is about 35 minutes and has 15 tracks, where Rise Above only has 11 tracks, yet is 45 minutes long. Then of course, there's the sound; I mean "Police Story" is a quiet, nylong-string guitar driven beauty. This is pretty bizarre. One of the most startling new compositions is "Gimme Gimme Gimme." There are gentle vocal melodies; the strange thing is that much of the album was recorded on four-track, but the vocal recordings here sound like they were pieced together in ProTools because of how they're stacked to imitate synthesizers, sounding like a much more complex synth line torn from "Such Great Heights." On top of this gentleness, there are absolute drum explosions, bringing in the chorus, that are so jarring, it recalls the sensation of the real Black Flag.

Obviously, this album is not for everyone. Longstreth's vocals fall somewhere on this side of a duck's bleat after being punched and you're especially not going to like this if you're way stoked on Black Flag and only other things that sound like Black Flag. If you can get past all of that, this is definitely an album to have in your life.

Rise Above
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