Rise Above

iTunes Review

Though Dave Longstreth has only been releasing music under The Dirty Projectors name for five years, he already seems to be proving himself to be a wildly inspired if willfully erratic musical visionary. Though previous Dirty Projectors albums, such as the epic Getty Address, have suffered from a lack of focus and an overflow of divergent creative impulses , Rise Above, an extremely loose re-interpretation of Black Flag’s epochal Damaged LP, may be the album on which Longstreth finally manages to synthesize his eclectic influences into a coherent whole. Longstreth’s work here, which juxtaposes hauntingly disjointed folk arrangements and staccato harmonies against Henry Rollins’ unflinchingly direct lyrics, painstakingly deconstructs the youthful aggression of songs like “Rise Above” and “Police Story,” and discovers nostalgic regret and bitter uncertainty in Black Flag’s angst filled masterpiece. With Rise Above Longstreth has managed to extract a work of singular originality and startling interpretive genius from the most unlikely of sources.