Art-rock has been such a lucrative racket ever since drugs became synonymous with rock and roll that it only makes sense its practitioners finally wanted in on themselves. Enter meta ol' 2007, in which we were treated to a goof-pop album from primordial adolescents Animal Collective, a wildly entertaining arena cartoon named Battles, and this strange collective recasting Black Flag's most well-known album as the stuff of drum circles, if not of Xiu Xiu.

The little I know about Dirty Projectors is that I'd scarcely heard their name in four albums before this well-cheered experiment lit up the nerds. I'll take those earlier albums now. This is pretty wondrous.

For those who actually care, the novelty factor begins and ends with "What I See," because if you thought "I wanna live/ I wish I was dead" was a funny mantra for three-chord punk, just wait 'til you hear it cooed by double-tracked and ultra-harmonized females. For the most part, resemblance to Black Flag's Damaged is barely acknowledged beyond Rise Above's lyrics, as the influential punk band was hardly known for structures shifting with the weight of plate tectonics, or for razor-thin guitar wirings that evoke an imagined midpoint between Les Savy Fav and Ali Farka Toure. And then there are the surprisingly well-controlled calisthenics of linchpin Dave Longstreth, whose vocal ululations are so hard to pin down you might hear Ted Leo and Antony in the same melisma.

None of this cheeky paint-splattering ever settles into so much as a mesa before dialing up the next scene, which makes for a fascinating experience. Marvel at the slow fade of "No More" from violin-sunsoak to a flutter of voices scraped by bone-dry cymbals. Compared to the rest of Rise Above, "Six Pack" is almost danceable, albeit transformed as a Malian desert blues, utilizing basic tricks of call-and-response and identifiable riffage ironically approached like an actual punk band. The resulting crud-wrapped-in-art-wrapped-in-crud is at least as funny as "Peacebone."

One coup this unexpectedly friendly record makes me miss is when my favorite records used to have a string of highlights as moments rather than memorable refrains. The glistening prettiness that opens "Thirsty and Miserable" deserves its psychedelic breakdown, and the overflowing sweetness when Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian mind-meld on "Rise Above" is too gorgeous. Everything really comes to a head on the stunning Afropop re-imagining of "Gimme Gimme Gimme," which promptly switches to a raga and then ultimately a Steve Reich-inspired voice circle. I didn't expect to write any of this crazy shit about an art-rock collection of Black Flag covers, much less enjoy it, but there you have it. The art-rockers will have the last laugh, at least as long as Panda Bear makes it onto year-end polls.