After dropping out of Yale’s musical program, David Longstreth made albums about post-9/11 America, environmentalism and 16th-century Spanish imperialism under the moniker Dirty Projectors. But it wasn’t until he made an album about an empty cassette that he found his most universal theme.
As the story goes, Longstreth retired to his parents’ house in 2006 after months of strenuous touring. Rummaging through his old belongings, Longstreth found an empty cassette of seminal punk rock icons Black Flag’s 1981 debut album, “Damaged.” This empty cassette became his muse for the Dirty Projectors next album, 2007’s “Rise Above.”
“It was an album that I listened to in middle school, and I really, really dug it shortly before I got into The Beatles and things like that and never looked back,” Longstreth said. “That first-generation punk stuff (provided) a fundamental direction for my early musical experience. (The cassette) was there, and it was a challenge that presented itself.”
Longstreth reassembled the Projectors in his Brooklyn house to record a song-by-song “reimagining” of Black Flag’s original LP, reworking 11 of the 15 songs that compose “Damaged” to reflect his own musical stylings.
While deconstructing “Damaged,” Longstreth largely tempered the ferocity of his source material, eliminating the punishing throttle provided by the Flag’s visceral guitar and the pummeling rhythm section. Instead, Longstreth reworked “Damaged” into a set of 11 kaleidoscopic tracks, in which West African-indebted guitar lines circle around orchestral string arrangements and woodwinds, traditional song structure is thrown out, and the R&B-influenced rhythm section does less to stabilize the arrangements than to provide another counterpoint.
The cathartic bellow of Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins is replaced with histrionic multipart harmonies between Longstreth and bandmates Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, in which liberal doses of melisma are applied with reckless abandon. To strict punk enthusiasts, this likely sounds like one of the worst ideas ever. But on “Rise Above,” all of these disparate sources congeal into an arresting, epic-in-nature testament to Rollins and company’s punk rock touchstone.
“The Flag’s (music) is hardly typical three-chord kind of punk,” Longstreth said. “It’s so intricate and so weird.”
The hybridization on “Rise Above” grants the music a kitchen-sink quality not readily apparent in the Flag’s original album. The Projectors’ version of “Depression” opens with quintessentially indie wiry guitar arpeggios and ’60s girl group call-and-response vocals before being interrupted by a series of sub-bass notes that sound as if they were culled from an Atlanta rap track.
“I like the idea of different people coming to (the album) with different levels of orientation, different levels of awareness or just different perspectives,” Longstreth said. “I think it’s the measure of an album ““ having different points of view that it can be seen from and still add up and mean something.”
By combining the ethos of “Damaged” with themes of oppression and perseverance, the Dirty Projectors reveal the humanism that lurked beneath the nihilism of first-generation punk rock.
“A lot of that first-generation punk rock was this expression of very prominent idealism,” Longstreth said. “It was like the utopian message of the ’60s. … I wanted to point to that.”