Rise Above
A song-by-song "reimagining" of Black Flag's Damaged, the excellent new album by Dirty Projectors is, more importantly, the work of a band that is restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one.
The concept is irresistibly rich—young musician goes home to his parents' house, finds an empty cassette case for Black Flag's Damaged, and tries to remake the album from memory—but it would be a mistake to hear Rise Above as a mere conceptual exercise. For one thing, Dirty Projectors couldn't sound less beholden to…
Approaching the albums you liked in your raging adolescence can form a wrenching disconnect between the memories of the fiery clench-fisted event and the reality on loop in between your ears. Like a Romantic poet ceaselessly trying to attain the…
Supposedly David Longstreth was on tour with the Dirty Projectors, the indie rock band he's been fronting since 2002, when he found himself thinking a great deal about Black Flag's epochal 1981 debut album, Damaged.
Dirty Projectors - Rise Above review: Effeminate hipsters cover legendary testosterone-fueled hardcore album and it actually works.