Dirty Projectors - Rise Above

Dirty Projectors - Rise Above(Dead Oceans, 2007)9 stars out of 10So many ways to begin talking about such a great work - likely to be the year's best album - that it's unfortunate that I've got to pin it down to one, but I'll choose Jorge Luis Borges. In 1939, Borges published a short work of fiction called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (read it here) in which a writer takes on a major project: to re-create the original Don Quixote word-for-word without using it as a reference. The character Menard confesses to never even having read the entire book, but such a thing does not stop him from believing fully in his attempt. Borges was an exemplary postmodern artist, someone who deconstructs in a manner that creates a sea of potential subtext while nonetheless having a firm grasp on the basic desires of the audience: lightness; drama; and perhaps most importantly, the visceral: the awe inspired by a scene or figure of beauty.With the latest Dirty Projectors album, Rise Above, David Longstreth wanted to remake the 1981 Black Flag album Damaged without using it as a reference. Two differences: 1) he'd been familiar with the entire album, just hadn't heard it in years, and 2) his aim was not to concretely recreate the songs but to reconjure them lyrically. With such a concept, not only does he pull a Pierre Menard, the stunning part is that he also pulls a Borges. Rise Above is a remarkable rock album. Despite all the high-concept talk I've slung so far, I also mean that it's so good, Longstreth should have had representatives from dozens of record labels knocking on his Myspace, each with a finely-chiseled offer, each of them impressing upon him the idea that his unique music is waiting to mean an enormous amount to quite a few people that don't even know it exists yet.Longstreth has written music for rock lineup, chamber ensembles, and electronic treatments of both and neither, all of which have been featured under the Dirty Projectors name. At the moment, the Dirty Projectors are a rock band, and Rise Above uses the forms of classical and modern Western pop, rock, and R&B, and also occasionally summons varying "African" styles - Kenyan benga, Congolese soukous, and for one song ("Six Pack"), electric Malian music. (There are also, by the way, a couple of expressionist fragments for string quartet. Too much information?) Why say "uses the forms" and all this, rather than just "it's rock inspired by Africa"? I've heard the latter before, but this is different: the rock of the pop-omnivorous composer, contemporary to Deerhoof and Sonic Youth, and somehow as well in the footsteps of Prince, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder and Destiny's Child, with seamless "it's-not-world-music" integration of African styles. The songs shift restlessly, changing tempo and timbre but rarely losing focus.As for the Rise Above ensemble, the rhythm section of Nat Baldwin (bass) and Brian McComber (drums), with additional guitar from Charlie Looker, seem to be game for anything Longstreth cooks up, as do the Pips to Longstreth's Gladys Knight, golden-throated backup vocalists Amber Coffman (also guitar) and Susanna Waiche. Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor, co-producer with Longstreth, helps to bring the warm reverb aesthetic from their critically acclaimed Yellow House; with the exception of a few studio tricks, some more subtle than others, the overall effect is of a live rock concert with a "great soundman" behind the boards. Over it all is Longstreth, proving his gifts never better on record than now.For one, he is the perfect vocalist for his own mission, possessing a deadly R&B-invoking melisma, as dynamic and perfect to pitch as necessary, yet sharpened with a rock singer edge that occasionally, and unpredictably, results in a corrosive scream. In front of this band, the shit devastates. For another, I've already touched on his composition and arrangements, which are tuneful, twisted and endlessly relistenable. Then there are his lyrics, which, on this album, are Black Flag lyrics rearranged. Strikingly, in fact, the only credit related to songwriting in the liner notes to Rise Above is a copyright to Greg Ginn/Cesstone Music, particularly strange considering that the music is clearly only Longstreth's. Just as one does not need to read Don Quixote to appreciate and recommend Borges's reportage of the fictional Pierre Menard's efforts, I cannot stress enough that it is still possible to enjoy Rise Above completely without having heard Black Flag's original Damaged.In Borges's story, his narrator is impressed by Menard's re-creation because, though it is a word-for-word copy of a 16th-century novel, it takes on a fresh relevance in a modern context. On Rise Above, essentially the same thing happens, and really, in both cases, it's merely the setting of a text. The words of a hardcore punk band become a composer's libretto, and so Rise Above is a compendium of 26-year-old punk emotions, statements like "this fucking city is run by pigs," "depression is gonna kill me" and "rise above" given an urgency less political and more abstractly visceral. The conviction of the performers, the dynamics of the music and the beat, urge themselves to you, such that you are physically compelled and drawn in. But because these performers are not, have no desire to be, and in many ways cannot be punk, the politics become images, and the imagery serves as the element of both tension and cohesion that pushes the work over the edge to become exceptionally engaging. And like powdered sugar on top, thanks to the source material being traceable, the history is there to be perused and compared and conjectured about - and, for those who were around, even remembered.Shut me up, though. Put as simply as I can put it, Rise Above does its own title proud and cuts through the bullshit. After a few years of fascinating sound-searching, David Longstreth's Dirty Projectors are finally ready for prime time. This music is pretty amazing. Watch his space.-Spencer OwenP.S. Two songs from Rise Above are on the DP's Myspace.