Dirty Projectors
Rise Above
[Dead Oceans; 2007]
Rating: 8.1
Dave Longstreth, like a lot of visionaries, is so full of bright ideas he can barely keep his shit together. Part of the problem is that he's indiscriminate about what he eats: Gustav Mahler, reggaetón, Malian guitar music, Cole Porter, band members. He's helmed a different roster of musicians for each Dirty Projectors album, and each album has had its own agenda. "Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego", from 2005's The Getty Address, plays like a parade of his fetishes: dissonant folk, looped bassoons, a rhythm track sounding like it was lifted from an R. Kelly record, and Longstreth in the middle, throttling his poor falsetto with vibrations violent enough to knock a drinking glass off a table.
After five or so years of cherrypicking from large groups of musicians, he's streamlined to a rock quartet, and they actually seem to matter to him in ways he can't shake: touring guitarist Amber Coffman and drummer Brian McOmber play on Rise Above; bassist and vocalist Angel Deradoorian hadn't joined yet, but has since been filling the parts played here by Nat Baldwin and Susanna Waiche. Hearing the band rip through material from last year's New Attitude EP on a recent Daytrotter session was like watching the glass slipper slide on.
While Longstreth's initial albums were mostly string-backed folk, he's now given himself up to rhythm-- in his words, his compositions have become more "horizontal" than "vertical." The horizontal's great for dancing-- an opportunity that arises a few times here-- but verticality is still the source of the songs' tensions. Coffman and Waiche's coos stack harmonies with Longstreth's bleat like little car wrecks, and even though the guitars move like a West African dance band or math rock, the songs seem propelled by the constant resolutions of notes rather than the beats themselves.
Then again, it's the combo-- a synthesis of heavy rhythms with an addiction to delicacy and ornament-- that makes Longstreth an innovative, paradoxical writer. "Spray Paint (The Walls)" is half-Soundgarden, half-Outkast. Some of this record sounds like Phish and some of it sounds like the Police. There's a verse in Esperanto. When Longstreth strides into the singer-songwriter spotlight, he's so determined to express himself he forgets the idea is to share, instead employing melisma that's so brutal it's almost embarrassing. And he sounds like he's having fun! And that's scary. Rise Above is serious, somewhat inhuman stuff, which is possibly why the band never smiles onstage: Longstreth, wide-eyed and focused, hair like wild grass; Deradoorian and Coffman looking eerily cornfed, as blank as backup singers in Mullholland Drive, their hands responsible for a completely different set of rhythms than their voices; McOmber a pair of arms occasionally rising above the wall.
But newfound focus from the band brings newfound exhaustion for listeners. For all his supposed messiness, Longstreth is actually really brittle and anal-retentive. That the album has a concept-- a song-by-song "reimagining" of Black Flag's Damaged-- scarcely matters to the listener, although it seems good for Longstreth: It gives the illusion of an anchor. He recently told me that it was his attempt at making a "New York album: angular, austere, obsessed with authenticity, like New York bands supposedly are." The assumptions seem off, but he probably hit the mark. They're consumed with cultural appropriation and aesthetic polyamory-- a post-pop-art idea of authenticity. Rise Above is so concerned about its polyrhythmic arrangements and precision that it can be suffocating on full listens. And though Longstreth tries to find color and protest in a bunch of songs about hating everyone's face and wanting to die, it's almost an afterthought-- unsurprisingly, the album's most bracing moment comes during the break in "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie", when Coffman and Waiche volley oh's and ah's without an English word in sight.
Rise Above will drop plenty of jaws, and, like Deerhoof, Dirty Projectors are restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one. To murder a cliché, whatever unfurls from Longstreth's brain next isn't anyone's guess-- Rise Above, for all its fastidiousness and minor drawbacks, finally displays the perfect counterargument to the portrait of him as another nutso college dropout: It displays a pattern.
-Mike Powell, September 07, 2007
http://www.myspace.com/dirtyprojectors
Review by Nate Dorr
This is crazy. There’s no reason this should work. This borders genius. Black Flag’s 1981 debut, Damaged, is a classic punk album in its own right, but what Dirty Projectors mastermind Dave Longstreth has done here is some kind of alchemy, turning straight-shooting punk guitar riffs into quiet breaths of orchestration and rapidly plucked guitar cascades, turning shouted choruses into two-part female harmonies and his own warbling voice, distilling normal bits of feedback into concentrated chugging blurts of white hot overdriven amp sludge. These aren’t even really covers; rather than write new arrangements from those of the songs themselves, Longstreth composed from time-worn memory and his own revisionist creative impulses for feverish, mercurial mixes that play out like one of those dreams where familiar scenes from your life are replayed all wrong, with people getting sucked into tea kettles only to be replaced by herds of singing, dancing farm animals that read you your junk mail.
As such, appreciation of Rise Above demands little actual knowledge of or devotion to the original templates on the part of the listener (I only half recall Damaged myself; I’d only heard it in snatches anyway—shhhh). Instead, this is more like a new stand-alone work quoting dramatically from rock history. Let’s take that timeless tale of harassment by the Man, “Police Story”, which displays some of the clearest recontexualized Black Flag lyrics. After the mournful flute-and-horn intro (sounding more like something from the classical arrangements of the entirely different last Dirty Projectors album, Don Henley rock opera The Getty Address), one of the album’s clearest, catchiest three chord sequences (though probably not one from the original) bursts through, and Longstreth begins twisting out his words over soft-strummed accompaniment and cooing back-up. Somehow it sounds more personal and real than ever here, as Longstreth’s voice catches and tears over “I tell them to go get fucked / they put me away”. There are plenty of other always-relevant themes here besides the cops: being depressed, drinking, wanting to drink but you’re almost out and the store’s closed.
Let’s go back and linger a little longer in wonder of Longstreth’s voice, which imbues “depression is gonna kill me tonight” with combined urgency and elegance. This voice, completely unique in its warbling and ringing and leaping over and around itself, is the one true common thread across the full Dirty Projectors history. Longstreth’s delivery owes something to the acrobatics of R&B, but he reinvents the specifics, as if working from a textbook description with no other fore-knowledge. In that way it’s a perfect match to the album concept: reconstructed, approximate R&B in service of a reimagined punk rock. The rest of his vocal team, at the time Amber Coffman and Susanna Waiche, now Coffman and Angel Deradoorian (who also took over bass duties from Nat Baldwin), form the backbone of the songs, harmonizing in lovely swells or (on the fantastic stop-start time-changing “Gimme Gimme Gimme") interlocking together in tight syncopation like a minimalist classical choir.
I feel that, in describing what Dirty Projectors has done, I still haven’t adequately described what they currently sound like. The guiding principles here seem to have been dynamics and progression. The songs move constantly on, rarely staying still, though they always make sure to linger and catch their breaths between the climactic crashes surging up throughout. Guitar and bass are still here to carry most melodies, but they dart in and out, guitar lines emerging in precision finger-plucking that seems appropriated from bluegrass while the bass hangs back, only appearing in full to accent key moments with fat, pendulous notes. Over this, all of the aforementioned vocal interplays, backup running right on top of Longstreth as often as they support him, and drummer Brian McOmber keeping up with all the changes to patch in a glimmer of high hats or a full gallop of kicks and snares. The songs only flirt with standard rock conceits, but when they hit—in the series of bass chugging noise interludes marking off the progress of “Thirsty and Miserable”, or the feedback squeal neatly dividing “What I See”, or the grinding menace of monolithic guitar that finally seems to be claiming its full place in “Room 13”—it’s devastating.
Dave Longstreth’s vision has always been determined and unique; it has never been this clear or viscerally exciting. He may have stripped punk of its sustained intensity, but its passion burns through, at turns finely wrought, and warmly human, and growlingly insatiable. Rise Above is not an album for people nostalgic for old Black Flag (indeed, some may be put off, though Longstreth seems to consider this to be an homage to a favorite of his adolesence) but much more broadly for people seeking a fresh voice and creative vitality. Past Dirty Projectors albums have threatened this sort of wide appeal, but were too insular, too scratchy and misshapen (however endearingly) to really take flight, where Rise Above stands good chance of catching ears that might previously have drifted by without pause. Perhaps this is why the core live band seems, finally, to have solidified into a consistent line-up with no sign of changing anytime soon: this is the best Dirty Projectors has sounded up to now, and they’ve got a lot of mileage yet.
RATING:8
— 12 September 2007
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