Dirty Projectors
OK, so if we’re honest, despite the contributions of Brian McOmber on drums, Amber Coffman on guitar and Angel Deradoorian on bass, Dirty Projectors pretty much is Dave Longstreth, and whoever else he wants playing music with him at whatever moment in time he’s in.
Dave went to Yale for a bit (where clever Americans go to become even cleverer Americans) but left to start focusing solely on recording music in 2000. He released an album under his birth name called ‘The Graceful Fallen Mango’, but such has been the all encompassing sheer size of the Dirty Projectors project that followed it that it now seems to be counted as the first album by this most special of bands.
But it wasn’t until 2003 that the world would see the release of the first Dirty Projectors album proper, ‘The Glad Fact’, which was released under Western Vinyl. The success of said record prompted Longstreth to explore the medium of the record, and the very nature of being in a band, a little further. His next release followed two years later – entitled ‘The Getty Address’, it was a concept album based on the life and times of Don Henley of the Eagles.
Longstreth enjoyed the whole concept album saga so much that he then embarked upon his most ambitious project to date – trying to recreate Black Flag’s seminal 1981 hardcore punk classic ‘Damaged’, but ‘re-imagined’ from memory. Interestingly, it sounds nothing like it. Even more interestingly, that doesn’t matter one bit. It sounds positively life affirming just the way it is.
**COMING SOON** - We’re heading to see Dirty Projectors tomorrow night, and catching up with Dave and the band beforehand, to get to the bottom of this whole ‘re-imagining’ business…
MYSPACE.COM/DIRTYPROJECTORS: Such is their dedication to letting the music do the talking, there’s actually very little about the Dirty Projectors that you can discover via the old wibbly wobbly. This is in fact the only official site dedicated to the band in existence. But still, it wasn’t too long ago that pictures, tour dates, four tracks, a blog and a video was all you needed for an official page anyway.
THIRSTY AND MISERABLE (LIVE):
RISE ABOVE (LIVE)