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Elly Roberts reviews
Rough Trade Records
- October 2007
- Rating: 2/10
New York musical maverick Dave Longstreth aka Dirty Projectors left Yale University to pursue a music career.
I say music with strong reservations. Longstreth isnt your average songwriter,so you may not have heard of his name or his music. Theres nothing here to hitdaytime radio playlists either. Nevertheless, he is an accomplished, if oddball, musician with a, strange, vision.
Drawing on all his powers of recall, Rise Above is a sort of tribute tohis teenage faves, Black Flag, as re-imagined from memory. The reason forthis is whilst helping his parents move house he found an empty tape case ofDamaged (1981). So in troubadour spirit he, well, remembered it all, we think.
He could have bought the original, but that would have been, dare I say it, too easy, and would have been (gasp) a covers album… a big no- no. Not havingheard Damaged, its impossible to compare and contrast the net results. Forstarters, vocally, hes in the same league as Antony Hegarty (Antony And TheJohnsons) but the music (muzak?) is of a totally different variety. Somehow, Iwouldnt imagine him sounding like a bunch of Punks either.
On face value therefore, Rise Above has some very odd, and I mean odd, moments, but mostly disasters. What I See is uhm, interesting, in a vocalsense, a bit bonkers, but ok. Then for No More, he beefs things up witha pulsating rhythm and string section before it goes, ah yes, bonkers. By nowweve gathered this is, different, very different. Jangly guitars introduceDepression with plenty of OTT backups and crashing… noise, followed byan equally eccentric rocker Six Pack with the girlie backups going ballistic.
A heavenly opening for Thirsty And Miserable leads to rambling, extraordinary,quirky variations with little real direction. Police Story sucks tunelessand painful wailings backed by gentle acoustic strumming. Shock horror. Room 13shows promise. Sweet backups and the tenderest of strums, until its spoilt,nay, destroyed by more, (not again please), weirdness.
To top it all off (I dont believe it) theres an untitled (and miserable)hidden instrumental track.
Strewth!
Weblinks:roughtraderecords.com /myspace.com/dirtyprojectors
The full list of tracks included are :
1. What I See
2. No More
3. Depression
4. Six Pack
5. Thirsty And Miserable
6. Police Story
7. Gimme Gimme Gimme
8. Spray Paint (The Walls)
9. Room 13
10. Rise Above
Elly Roberts passed away in 2011, but he was a man who was so passionate about all types of music and loved meeting his musical heroes, such as Mick Hucknall at a book signing at the Trafford Centre, Manchester in 2007.
A former teacher and also a music journalist, DJ and radio presenter on local community station Calon FM, plus appearances on BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru and BBC Radio 2, Elly started doing reviews for DVDfever.co.uk in 2004 and he did the majority of the CD and concerts reviews on the website.
I know also that he loved getting away for the summer to Spain and I hope that wherever he is now he is enjoying the hot sunshine and, as one of his friends has said on his Facebook page, that he is interviewing his musical heroes.