Damaged News

In an ongoing effort to better understand the many classic albums of Los Angeles, we've come upon an equation that gets to the heart of the matter without much thinking, analysis, verbiage or any of those other "old-model" music criticism techniques that have become obsolete.

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.

Dave Longstreth doesn't make it easy for admirers to unravel the meanings and motivations behind his music.

In 1981, Black Flag released the album Damaged . The fifth song on that album, a cornerstone of the American hardcore movement, is "T.V. Party," a direct critique of America's complacent consumption of popular culture, in this case in the form of television: We've got nothing better to do Than watch TV and have a couple of brews.

Tuesday, July 7, at 7:30 p.m., $15; 771-1422, www.theindependentsf.com . Dirty Projectors by Doug Wallen The new Dirty Projectors record, Bitte Orca , sounds as if mastermind David Longstreth took advice from the title of his 2007 triumph, Rise Above .