Dead Oceans

Yale dropout Dave Longstreth is the first person to truly surprise me with music in three years. After a lifetime of near-constant music listening, in addition to deafness, there’s an inevitable contentment with being pleased by the perfect execution of a new trick, or the unexpected revival of an old one. But this album’s attempt to rearrange Black Flag songs (Longstreth claims “from memory”) is more than a mere trick. The songs are simply unrecognizable except by the song titles and lyrics. Longstreth assembles a host of backup singers, jangly guitars, schizophrenic percussion, and his own warbling, nearly uncontrollable voice, which can only be compared to Antony Hegarty’s, if to anyone’s at all. The term ‘deconstruction’ has been worn out this decade, but in this case, with Henry Rollins’ thoughts turned inside out like a sock so the fuzzy seams can be stroked, there’s no other word to describe what’s happening. Once the rage is replaced by a curiously nervous kind of joy, the adolescent tales of alcoholism and destruction become middle-aged fears of death-by-self. The elegy for punk’s golden age comes not from within the genre—which, on all levels but the local, long ago embraced the necessary hypocrisies of capitalism—but from this weird place: an art project at once celebratory and transformative. Here is your new anarchy, and I dare say it rocks.

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