Dave Longstreth, like a lot of visionaries, is so full of bright ideas he can barely keep his shit together. Part of the problem is that he's indiscriminate about what he eats: Gustav Mahler, reggaetón, Malian guitar music, Cole Porter, band members. He's helmed a different roster of musicians for each Dirty Projectors album, and each album has had its own agenda. "Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego", from 2005's The Getty Address, plays like a parade of his fetishes: dissonant folk, looped bassoons, a rhythm track sounding like it was lifted from an R. Kelly record, and Longstreth in the middle, throttling his poor falsetto with vibrations violent enough to knock a drinking glass off a table.
After five or so years of cherrypicking from large groups of musicians, he's streamlined to a rock quartet, and they actually seem to matter to him in ways he can't shake: touring guitarist Amber Coffman and drummer Brian McOmber play on Rise Above; bassist and vocalist Angel Deradoorian hadn't joined yet, but has since been filling the parts played here by Nat Baldwin and Susanna Waiche. Hearing the band rip through material from last year's New Attitude EP on a recent Daytrotter session was like watching the glass slipper slide on.
While Longstreth's initial albums were mostly string-backed folk, he's now given himself up to rhythm-- in his words, his compositions have become more "horizontal" than "vertical." The horizontal's great for dancing-- an opportunity that arises a few times here-- but verticality is still the source of the songs' tensions. Coffman and Waiche's coos stack harmonies with Longstreth's bleat like little car wrecks, and even though the guitars move like a West African dance band or math rock, the songs seem propelled by the constant resolutions of notes rather than the beats themselves.
Then again, it's the combo-- a synthesis of heavy rhythms with an addiction to delicacy and ornament-- that makes Longstreth an innovative, paradoxical writer. "Spray Paint (The Walls)" is half-Soundgarden, half-Outkast. Some of this record sounds like Phish and some of it sounds like the Police. There's a verse in Esperanto. When Longstreth strides into the singer-songwriter spotlight, he's so determined to express himself he forgets the idea is to share, instead employing melisma that's so brutal it's almost embarrassing. And he sounds like he's having fun! And that's scary. Rise Above is serious, somewhat inhuman stuff, which is possibly why the band never smiles onstage: Longstreth, wide-eyed and focused, hair like wild grass; Deradoorian and Coffman looking eerily cornfed, as blank as backup singers in Mullholland Drive, their hands responsible for a completely different set of rhythms than their voices; McOmber a pair of arms occasionally rising above the wall.
But newfound focus from the band brings newfound exhaustion for listeners. For all his supposed messiness, Longstreth is actually really brittle and anal-retentive. That the album has a concept-- a song-by-song "reimagining" of Black Flag's Damaged-- scarcely matters to the listener, although it seems good for Longstreth: It gives the illusion of an anchor. He recently told me that it was his attempt at making a "New York album: angular, austere, obsessed with authenticity, like New York bands supposedly are." The assumptions seem off, but he probably hit the mark. They're consumed with cultural appropriation and aesthetic polyamory-- a post-pop-art idea of authenticity. Rise Above is so concerned about its polyrhythmic arrangements and precision that it can be suffocating on full listens. And though Longstreth tries to find color and protest in a bunch of songs about hating everyone's face and wanting to die, it's almost an afterthought-- unsurprisingly, the album's most bracing moment comes during the break in "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie", when Coffman and Waiche volley oh's and ah's without an English word in sight.
Rise Above will drop plenty of jaws, and, like Deerhoof, Dirty Projectors are restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one. To murder a cliché, whatever unfurls from Longstreth's brain next isn't anyone's guess-- Rise Above, for all its fastidiousness and minor drawbacks, finally displays the perfect counterargument to the portrait of him as another nutso college dropout: It displays a pattern.
