MAKING A COMEBACK
Death From Above set for Upstate Concert Hall show
CLIFTON PARK, N.Y.» Dance-rock duo Death From Above is coming through the Capital Region in support of new album Outrage! Is Now.
Canada’s Sebastien Grainger (vocals, drums) and Jesse F. Keeler (bass, keys, synths) first started this act more than a decade ago.
After a debut album called You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, Death From Above spent several years on hiatus, until it started back up in 2011.
One back on the scene, Death From Above made a comeback with a release called The Physical World in 2014 - and despite the long wait fans were still on board.
Now, Death From Above is touring on its latest album Outrage! Is Now, which was released last month, and the duo is set to perform locally in the Capital Region for the first time ever.
The show, opened by female rockers and fellow Canadians The Beaches, will take place at 8 p.m. on Monday at Upstate Concert Hall, located at 1208 Route 146 in Clifton Park. Doors will open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $27.50 per person.
Ahead of this concert, Keeler shared his thoughts on returning from hiatus, maintaining an everevolving sound and creating the unique music that Death From Above listeners have come to love.
Q: What are you most looking forward to about Death From Above’s upcoming tour, following the release of Outrage! Is Now?
A: Really just playing new songs. It’s exciting. And also the songs sort of - the writing process finished with the record, really because you write this song but then you might be editing it or making little changes right up until the end. And so then when you go out to play it live, that’s sort of when it develops into its own. When we first toured the last record, that was something that I didn’t know was going to happen. I didn’t realize that as we were touring that the songs would continue to evolve. The state that they’re in now, it’s so different than the way they were recorded. That process in very fun for me, so I am quite excited about getting to do that again with these songs, and even the songs form the new record that we’ve been playing out at festivals and the shows that we have played so far. It’s just been so fun.
Q: How long did it take you to write this record? Did you have some of those songs around for a while, or did you set aside some time specifically to write it?
A: I started writing in the end of 2015, and Seb was doing the same. Some songs we wrote together. Sometimes we’d write separately and come together on things, sending things back and forth. Seb lives in LA and I live here [Canada]. So we would send stuff back and forth and then we would get together and work away on whatever we’d written separately. And then once we had probably two records worth of demos together, that’s when we got [producer] Eric Valentine involved, and really just let him pick. Like ‘Okay Eric what do you think the record should be of all these songs?’ and it was cool because when he responded to that and picked what he liked the best it was all the stuff that we also liked the best. There was sort of like a bit of confirmation.
Q: Was there anything in particular that this album is about or that inspired you in your writing?
A: I’m always inspired by the same thing, which is really just that I’m trying to avoid repeating myself musically. For me that’s something that - it is really the most challenging to try to always be finding a new thing to do rather than just finding more of the same. And I don’t know that it’s something that you can ever really do completely. I know that my musical sensibility will come out in everything that I do. It doesn’t matter genre, project, band. Whatever it is I know that my sensibility will come through everything. But the challenge of trying to avoid doing anything you’ve done before again - it gets harder as you go. The more things that I’ve made, the more things that are crossed off the list. So that for me is really fun, but that’s sort of what has always inspired me since I started making music and started recording music. So I look back at when I was a kid even. Every time I would try to do something I would always try to avoid doing that same thing again.
Q: What was the new factor you added in on this most recent record to make it new?
A: It’s more like a process of catching yourself if you fall into some sort of familiar pattern and recognizing like ‘Is that part of today’s creativity or is that your brain being lazy?’ Being able to recognize that in yourself is hard. I know that human being like to find our way of being comfortable and do that comfortable thing over and over again. And I certainly do that in other aspects of my life, but not when it comes to music.
There’s a lot of things that we’ve done in the past that were based around just like jamming together and playing songs that sort of develop out of us just freeform making music. When we would try to do that we’d start to notice similarities, and so we really worked much harder on writing songs more fully on our own and then bringing them together. So that was definitely one different thing this time around.
Q: Was this your first time writing a record while living in different countries?
A: The last record I went to LA
for a much longer time, and I had a whole bunch of demos of like riffs and stuff that I’d put together, and then when we got down to LA then we wrote together for quite a while. And really, the majority of the songs on the last album came through that writing time. Which actually, when I think about it is kind of crazy, most of the record was written in about a month.
That last record was very different because it was our first record back after almost 10 years, and so we were thinking about the band sort of as a third entity. Because the band had existed for such a long time without us.
Q: What was that like for you coming back from that period and getting back into the music scene as Death From Above? Were your fans right there waiting for you or was it kind of like you had to start over a little bit?
A: It’s a weird thing when you make something and you’re a part of it and then it continues to exist when you’re not a part of it. It’s hard to be possessive or see something as being really yours when it’s had just as much life without you as it has with you. That definitely changes your perspective on it. That’s kind of where we were coming from when we made the last record. Even if I look at old interviews, I keep noticing that we referred to the band like it’s like this other guy. But in a real way, it was. When you’ve got
this sort of piece of you hanging out there for such a long time.
Even when we started playing again, to see how much it changed with the fans and everything about the situation we stepped back into was different. And at first it was just shocking and we figured it was just people being excited, but then over time you realize well it’s also because people have had years and years with those songs from our initial output, and it had grown and developed in the way that something does, I guess, over the course of many years and people like it.
Creatively, I’m not going to say it’s stifling, but it definitely sort of aims you in a direction when your own legacy is so defined. You feel like you’ve got to respect it.
But this record, I don’t think that ever crossed our minds for a moment. We decided a long time ago that if we were going to be a band again that we had to be making music and it had to be evolving and it had to be a creative outlet. It couldn’t just be us trying to recreate whatever 25-year-old us had made. So doing that is not as easy as it seems when you’ve got this weird sort of, it’s not a burden, but there’s like a yardstick that everything you do is going to be measured against.
More information on Death From Above and its upcoming shows is available online at www. deathfromabove1979.com.