Radio Exile | The Dirty Projectors

The Dirty Projectors – Rise Above Review

By Dan Berkman September 4, 2007 Post a comment | Email the author

Dirty Projectors – Official Site, MySpace

As an experiment, Dirty Projectors leader Dave Longsreith took out his old leather jacket and tried to rewrite Black Flag’s classic debut full length Damaged.

Now, you are probably thinking this is one of the cases where a soundalike band takes on an album’s worth of their heroes music, like we have had heard so many times before when Screeching Weasel “just had” to record a whole Ramones album, but this is not the case here. Longstreith’s music is a long way from Black Flag. Instead of adrenaline filled blues played at light speed we get snail paced versions of the tunes with warm vocal harmonies and lovingly picked guitar. In fact, many songs on the album double, and in some cases, triple their original lengths. Although oddly, only “Depression I” is covered and is shorter than the original track.

The changes made to the songs are dramatic. For example, the power packed anti-cop anthem “Police Story” is given an acoustic recasting which doesn’t really work. All of the emotion is gone. It is turned from a song of rage to a song so light and airy that you might say it is a Cat Stevens cover before you would assume it had anything to do with Black Flag.

In fact some versions are boring if not annoying. In some cases Longstreith’s high piercing voice can really grate on the listener. A fine example is the mess that is “Six Pack”. First of all, Longstreith does away with the song’s pulse racing bass line and replaces it with a swirling nonsensical guitar part and tribal sounding drums that do not fit at all. Not only in the sense of a Black Flag song but in the sense of traditional song structure. He just skips right to the song. Along with this disaster we have female backing vocals which come across as so cheesy that it has hard to not get them confused with a girl singing a hook from a Tone Loc record. It is not original. It is not groundbreaking. It is just torture.

At no point through the 40 minute plus run do we get even a glimpse of Black Flag. Longstreith versions are clearly just his own songs. Not a touch of the original survives except for the lyrics, which are indistinguishable thanks to Longstreith’s high pitched voice and out of sync music. Not to say that covers should sound exactly like the original, but there should at least be some hint as to what you are replicating. Despite the additional minutes added to several tracks, the music is not very exciting.

In “Rise Above”, the original is no Bob Dylan piece of poetry, but it gets your blood flowing and singing along and it’s over in two minutes and change. In the Dirty Projectors version, they take out the gasoline and drag the simple nature of the song out to five minutes without putting in any music that warrants doing it. It is just the simple melody repeated again and again ad nauseum. As if it had become an elevator music version of the song rather than an indie one.

If Longstreith and company wanted to make a record of the tunes they wrote, surely they could have just walked into a studio and cut the album. They didn’t need the pretense of doing a Black Flag recasting to get that done, although it will surely help them with sales or at least get people to give it a listen. The band didn’t even have the decency or respect for Black Flag to cover their entire album, they forget to do what can only be expected as a subpar job on favorites like “Padded Cell,” “Damage 2″ and the classic “TV Party.”

If you treat the Dirty Projector’s Rise Above as not an attempt to remake a Black Flag album, but more as a coincidence that the two albums share a song title, then the record can be considered alright. In fact there are even a couple of highlights like, “Thirsty and Miserable” which really showcases how great The Dirty Projectors can be. The tune is so sweet that it practically puts a warm summer breeze through your hair.

“What I See” is given a Funkadelic treatment with warm crispy bass and a catchy light guitar line surrounding it. Aside from these few hallmarks the rest is just a rambling, off kilter and annoying trips through one of punk rock’s greatest albums. Sometimes less is more and in this case, less is also better too.