Dirty Projectors

Related Content

• Dirty Projectors perfected Swing Lo Magellan outside the city
  July 11, 2012
• The Residents
  February 13, 2013
• How I lost my record store virginity at Northern Lights
  January 31, 2013
• Ani DiFranco at First Avenue, 9/23/12
  September 24, 2012
• Night Moves share "Country Queen," announce Colored Emotions release show
  August 24, 2012

More About

• Dirty Projectors
• Greg Ginn
• David Longstreth
• Punk Rock
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Dirty Projectors' last album, 2007's Rise Above, was a chamber-rock rewrite-from-memory of Black Flag's 1981 hardcore punk classic Damaged, a radical reinterpretation so thorough that the songs were barely recognizable. Amid the flighty mannerist quaver of singer Dave Longstreth, the unresolved answer harmonies of Amber Coffman, and the Afropoppy guitars of both, the music's lumbering, anti-funk syncopation evoked Ani DiFranco scatting Zappa to an endless Captain Beefheart break—striking, original, yet somehow disposable in its strangeness. The refusal of any songful elements seemed doubly odd given the source material—Greg Ginn wrote riffs, hooks, and choruses, however bare-bones or tuneless. The band's acclaimed new album, Bitte Orca, is as jagged and surface-rich, but with tunes striving more than before to come together as pop, rock, or R&B while still feeling like the musical equivalent of a sputtering run-on sentence. With tUnE-yArDs. All ages.
Wed., Nov. 11, 7 p.m., 2009