Rise Above

Suddenly this album struck me. I have been listening obsessively for days. I think I need to get this out...

The story goes--Dave Longstreth, rummaging through some old tapes, found the case to Black Flag's Damaged, an album which he was obsessed with as a kid. There was no cassette, only the liner notes. At some point he decides to use his discovery, re-imagining Damaged without revisiting. All he has is his memory, his artistic openness, and his mastery of craft. The result is Rise Above by his outfit The Dirty Projectors, released Sept. 11, 2007.

Essentially, its an album about memory--a picture of a man reflecting with nostalgia, regret, at times disgust, on his life post-punk. In "No More," when Longstreth, with a voice as free as a geyser, as controlled as a laser, laments with a belt, "every night I get drunk," arching the last word with a lilting falsetto, his self-hatred is palpable. He has fucked up, and now he has to live with it.

Even physically, what happens with fingers and drums. Its effortless. The entire virtuosic intro to "Spray Paint (The Walls)" or the guitar breakdown (literally, breakdown) on "Rise Above" feels like the buzz of the appendages themselves are keeping them moving, the body is numb, half-asleep. The fingers just move, of their own accord and out come these jolting and perfectly melodic phrases or waking lilts. The fingers of someone who has been there before, who’s seen it all before, and can’t bring himself to care, but the marks of age are bubbling up to the scarred surface.

But this interpretation of the album hardly scratches the surface of its depth.

For as raw and emotional as the album is, as compositionally sophisticated, and as, yes, beautiful as it is, its still, to its core, punk rock. It is anti-establishment intrinsically in the most gut wrenching and sorrowful and, at least in the title track, hopeful way. It doesn't have to be vocal about it.

And musically it is doing something that punk rock can no longer do. The album is jarring on a sonic level. The collision of disparate musical elements, abrasive time signatures, pounding rhythms that crash in before their welcome, tortured vocal chords that penetrate a little too loudly, and for a little too long, create an aggressive tension of unrest—nothing is going right, and someone is disturbed about it. If Damaged is an album, lyrically and musically, about a man railing against his situation in the world, a political album, Rise Above is deeply personal, a reflection on the man himself, in the context of his noisy world. While the anti-authority sentiment is considerably more tired, the emotional earnestness is painfully present.

It exists behind Damaged, underneath it, and moving through it. With Damaged, Black Flag was unabashed with how fucked up their lives were. They would go out, wreak havoc, get busted by the cops, go home and get wasted. Longstreth turns that into Rise Above, a dissection of what is beneath all that—the fear, insecurities, desire for a better life—manifesting itself in such destructive ways. For that, with its fierce sensitivity and intellect, it is a braver record, deeply indebted to the tunnel-vision of its past, and ready to move on.

In real time, it is a perfect marker of how far we’ve come, how far the walls have been pushed out. Punk rock has been co-opted—a tragedy of modern music, not because the potential for a lot of great art was lost, but that it was allowed to happened at all. The effects of that led to a struggle to create independent music that could not be embraced, could not be spun. And, in a triumph of modern music, of which we are in the throes at the moment, the struggle did not lead us downward in the direction of Black Flag, but upward with more complex, difficult, personal music—music that is changing the landscape of rock ‘n’ roll (an already impossibly vast landscape) on compositional and emotional levels, in ways more profound than bands of the Black Flag ilk could have imagined. A look at the list we’ve created below, and we see artists—Grizzly Bear (who, to me, is the touchstone of this movement, and whose Chris Taylor co-produced Rise Above with Longstreth), Deerhoof, Menomena, Longstreth and co.—that are new pioneers, forging forward, constantly expanding the capacity of rock ‘n’ roll, refusing to accept that there are rules to what goes into a song. Rise Above is a formally masterful work of art. It is radical and beautiful and shows us that independent music may be the last art form where avant garde can actually still exist.

mark.