eMusic Review 0
Rise Above began as a happy accident: cleaning out his parents 'home, Dirty Projectors mastermind Dave Longstreth came across the empty cassette case for Black Flag's epochal debut album Damaged — "It was my jam," he's said, "probably the first music I ever got into" — and decided to rewrite the album, retaining only the lyrics. It's a radical makeover, with West African guitars, odd meters, chamber music interludes, transient noise-bursts, tastes of post-millennial r&b and dizzying female vocal arrangements that explode into plangent harmonic bombshells. Longstreth's singing — somewhere between an '80s soulman and a lost sheep — isn't for everyone, but so are most things worth a damn. Don't forget how utterly weird David Byrne sounded when Talking Heads '77 came out.
It's fitting that Rise Above was released on the anniversary of September 11th: right around then all the coolest bands began assiduously mining the post-punk era; underground music became staid and, understandably at the time, escapist. Back in the late '70s, Black Flag rebutted post-punk's arty excesses with blunt aggression, and in so doing made iconoclastic art-rock of their own. So it's also fitting that the Dirty Projectors used Damaged to… read more »
