ARTiST: The Dirty Projectors
TiTLE: Rise Above
LABEL: Dead Oceans
GENRE: Indie
TiME: 45:47 min
SiZE:  52,7 MB
BiTRATE: VBRkbps
RiP DATE: Sep-13-2007
RELEASE DATE: Sep-11-2007
WEBSiTE: n/a

Track List:

01. What I See                                 03:27
02. No More                                    05:04
03. Depression                                 03:50
04. Six Pack                                   03:48
05. Thirsty & Miserable                        02:48
06. Police Story                               03:07
07. Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie                       06:00
08. Spray Paint (The Walls)                    04:25
09. Room 13                                    04:53
10. Rise Above                                 03:37
11. Untitled                                   04:48

Release Notes:

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.