Death From Above on avoiding the blues
Surprising new album from Toronto rock duo leaves band satisfied like never before
Most bands don’t take more than 15 years to start really probing the reaches of their true potential but, then again, most bands aren’t granted a career arc as unintentionally leisurely as the one traced by Death From Above.
This past Friday, the Toronto duo of Sebastien Grainger and Jesse F. Keeler issued Outrage! Is Now, just the third album proper they’ve managed to complete since joining forces as DFA in 2001 — and subsequently breaking up in abrupt and ugly fashion five years later and then reforming in response to stubbornly persistent “popular demand” in 2011 — but also the record where they’ve finally put in enough consistent, harmonious time together to start pushing the creative boundaries of what they do together.
In some respects, the stylistically loose and rather whimsical Outrage! Is Now could be considered Death From Above’s belated “difficult second album,” since 2014’s The Physical World came 10 long years after the pair’s internationally acclaimed debut, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, and was basically the sound of a band starting over again and figuring out whether or not it actually had another record in it.
“The last record, bless its heart, even when we started making it, we weren’t sure we were going to make it. When we first started demo-ing it, we didn’t know that was going to be a record,” says drummer/vocalist Grainger over breakfast with Keeler in a nondescript strip of Etobicoke near the band’s rehearsal studio. “It was, like, ‘Well, maybe we should make a record.’ With this one, we knew we were making a record from the getgo, so we were just trying to have fun and make music that amused us, y’know? And I think that comes through.”
“I notice it now when we’re playing the songs in rehearsal. I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, these are all very satisfying things to play,’ ” affirms Keeler, the nimble bassist half of DFA. “I mean, the last record was a record written with crazy expectations.”
Confronted with a compliment from this writer that Outrage! Is Now might be his favourite Death From Above album, both Keeler and Grainger concede that it’s their favourite piece of work they’ve done together, too. It is, at least, the one “that’s got the least amount of things I wanna change when I hear it,” as Keeler puts it, to nod of agreement from his bandmate.
You really can hear DFA having fun on Outrage! The album, produced by sometime Queens of the Stone Age collaborator Eric Valentine, expands their palette well beyond the breakneck punk-metal for which they’re typically known, definitely leaning on the metal side more heavily than before while also throwing unexpected splashes of Scott Walker, Bowie in Berlin, tangled electrobeats, rave-y piano vamps and the blues in there — the latter despite the fact that Grainger wrote “AVOID THE BLUES” on a white board in the studio “because every time I would leave Jesse and Eric alone there would be, like, Eric Clapton’s greatest hits playing.”
With the pressure to demonstrate that Death From Above was still a relevant musical force, post-reunion, lifted by the success of The Physical World — which made it to No. 3 on the Canadian album chart in 2014 — the two old friends-turned-foes-turned-friends-again found themselves with no obligations to please anyone but themselves during the making of Outrage! Is Now. Well, themselves, and perhaps the legions of fans who turned You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine into a hit during DFA’s temporary absence from the scene.
“I think they still want us to prove them right for liking us,” says a laughing Keeler. “But the only firm idea was that we were going to do something different and it wasn’t just going to be more of the same. That’s always been our hope, which is a challenge when you’re just using the same two people and the same two things, more or less . . . but, of all the things that I would write, Seb would always gravitate toward the things that were the most unlike what we’d done before.”
DFA found a willing co-conspirator in Valentine. Incidentally, it wasn’t the hard-rock and punk credentials their chosen producer has logged over the years on records by the likes of the Dwarves and Taking Back Sunday, not to mention Queens of the Stone Age’s classic Songs for the Deaf, that drew Grainger and Keeler to him.
“Those things are cool, but what really excited us about his catalogue was Smashmouth and Third Eye Blind and all this bluegrass stuff because then you realize: ‘Wait a second, this guy is not going to try to stick us in a box built on his previous success,’ ” Keeler says. “And he was just unfazed by anything we ever threw at him. He treated us like us.”
Speaking of “treating us like us,” Death From Above — as observant readers might have noticed — is no longer saddled with the cumbersome “1979” at the end of its name that was, for a time, necessitated by a legal dispute with James Murphy’s DFA Records in 2004.
Despite some initial ill will between the band and the LCD Soundsystem frontman — they initially declared “jihad” on him on their website back in the day — DFA (the band) and Murphy have become friendly over the years, so Grainger and Keeler then simply decided to stop using the “1979” on their posters and tour merchandise and records — as Grainger puts it, “to see what would happen.” And nothing happened.
Indeed, Keeler pulls out his phone to present a lengthy text-message exchange with Murphy beginning with “Congrats on the reclamation of your name. I found out because some blog dork wanted my comment” and ending with “This is me making a statement: Death From Above, the band, is now Death From Above again, not Death From above 1979.”
“Then he told me he was going to bed and it was at 9:53 and I was making fun of him and I sent him a picture of me in bed reading a book,” Keeler says. “In reality it was just two lawyers creating work for themselves.”
“With this one, we knew we were making a record from the get-go, so we were just trying to have fun and make music that amused us, y’know?” SEBASTIEN GRAINGER DEATH FROM ABOVE DRUMMER/VOCALIST