Dirty Projectors - Rise Above

Quirky, hypnotic, energetic, and (at times) beautiful....I really like this record. David Longstreth, the principal creative force behind the Projectors, sings, alternating (as is his thing) between warbling vibrattos and careening screeches. This can be, I admit, a bit of an acquired taste, but it's also kind of a cool game: unstable vocal leaps, as they get close to something beautiful, splinter into pieces...then, when they do splinter, they're mutated in turn (by gorgeous vocal accompaniments) into harmonies that seem exponentially more full...as if they could only get there by bursting ugly first. It's great, and what drives everything is the truly inventive rhythm on this album-- weird jangly guitar runs, drumming that alternates subtle and relentless.  

In the bits and pieces I've heard of the Dirty Projectors, I've always been drawn in by the wonderful precision of their messiness-- songs that begin to emerge, duck elsewhere, lose themselves, find something (different) again. It can be exhausting listening, but I always find the uneven spits of beauty well worth (and probably caused by) the effort in between. 

From the reception of Rise Above, people seem to be relieved at the kinder balance; many of the songs are not only stylistically tight, but downright catchy. The album is conceptually tight, too-- a near-complete remaking of Black Flag's Damaged (1981).There's a shared spirit of resistance here, although Longstreth obviously takes it well into his own direction. What's so interesting about the project is that in contrast to Damaged, Rise Above's urgency comes less from anger than from, I think, creativity. That this urgency might actually be a response, albeit two decades removed, to the same source-- i.e. authority in its dehumanizing forms--is what gives the creative peaks of this album their own, peculiar, power.

Understand, we're finding a war we can't win

They hate us, we hate them

We can't win