The love below

Death from Above 1979 reveal the men behind the machine

BY STUART BERMAN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAULA WILSON

The only certainty in music journalism is uncertainty -- interviews never happen on time, Lollapaloozas get cancelled, freelance cheques have a peculiar tendency to get lost in the mail. However, when you interview a band called Death from Above, you can usually expect that band will still be called Death from Above when the story goes to print a few weeks later.

But as of last week, Death from Above are dead; in their place we have Death from Above 1979 -- a small change to avoid a big lawsuit from NYC super-producers The DFA (The Rapture, Radio 4), who claim ownership of the acronym and the words it stands for.

The name switcheroo is a rite of passage experienced by a select group of emerging rock bands (see The Charlatans UK, The London Suede, Dinosaur Jr.), though the idea of the Toronto DFA getting legal grief from a couple of renowned New York hipsters is especially rich: since forming Death from Above in their Beaches basement three years ago, bassist Jesse F. Keeler and drummer/vocalist Sebastien Grainger have secluded themselves in an impenetrable sanctuary of noise, determinedly oblivious to the whims of cool-kid fashionability and indie-rock scenesterism.

The cease-and-desist order also underscores how much of a threat DFA79 have become since they released their 2002 debut, Heads Up!, on Vancouver indie Ache Records.

At the time, DFA79 was considered a casual time-killer for the two housemates between practices for Femme Fatale, the noise-punk project Keeler formed after the demise of his previous band, Black Cat #13 (which also spawned art-pop screechers The Sick Lipstick). Grainger -- a big Yes and Beatles enthusiast who rates Jesus Christ Superstar among his favourite records -- would get behind the kit, screaming and bashing like he'd been doused in gasoline and was waiting for the match to drop. Keeler -- a one-time stockbroker, part-time house/ hip-hop DJ and the son of a Steppenwolf guitarist -- laid down queasy low-end tremors powerful enough to rearrange your intestines and empty them. But somewhere in the middle of this car-crash cacophony, they found a sound that was as insidiously melodic as it was fiercely abrasive.

"Our first record was like our version of Music from Big Pink by The Band," Keeler says over beers with Grainger, some 14 hours before the duo boarded a plane to Heathrow for a whirlwind July tour of the UK, Germany, Japan and Australia. "We were just out on the east side, having no idea what's going on in the Toronto music scene, just in our own little world, writing for ourselves."

When the duo emerged from the basement and rode the 501 car to the club district, the west end didn't know what hit it. Their music was the anti-emo: instead of whining about a world that had done them wrong, Keeler and Grainger spoke unsentimentally of taking responsibility for your biological imperatives -- most infamously on the Heads Up! track "Dead Womb," a sincere plea for domesticity couched in a scathing commentary linking cocaine abuse to infertility.

"Some of our ideas may seem weird to other people because we live in a Western culture that seems of be in denial of their human reality," Keeler says. "We're from a culture that has put off having kids until we're in our mid-thirties, we stay in school till we're 30, we've shunned so many natural, animalistic aspects of our lives.... Maybe that's why we get along, because we have the need to make physical things and be the source of something starting, rather than just a hollow tube that commerce and information flow through."

"If I wasn't doing this, I'd go straight into manual labour," says Grainger, who proudly declares he has dropped out of school three times, and recommends all you kids out there do the same. "Don't be a fuckin' graphic designer -- why can't a white-bread middle-class person be a cabinet maker? How many graphic designers do we know that do porn sites because they can't get a fuckin' job doing graphic design? What the hell's a consultant? Build me a fucking drawer!"

But by ingratiating themselves to no one, DFA79 picked up fans from all corners of rock's under- and overgrounds. Their fearsome live reputation scored them opening slots for everyone from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars to The Von Bondies and Anthrax -- and their t-shirts have made appearances in two out of three Billy Talent videos.

Now the duo find themselves working for Nelly Furtado's lawyer, having signed to Toronto legal impresario Chris Taylor's Last Gang Records imprint in Canada; meanwhile, in the US and UK, the band rubs shoulders with The Streets on the Vice/679 Recordings roster. With the Sept. 7 release of DFA79's powerhouse full-length debut, You're a Woman, I'm a Machine, the band's new bosses will try to sell the world on a once unfathomable but now potentially lucrative idea: that at its bloody and bruised core, DFA79 is simply a great pop band.

"There's a huge difference between art and commercial art," Keeler says. "Commercial art is made for sale, art is just made. We're never going to be able to get to that mental space where commercial art is being made, because clearly nothing about our band is intended to be commercial in any way. It's just a coincidence that the world has come to a place where they think our band is great. Bombs are dropping, people are blowing up dressed as pregnant women -- this is the band!"

And this is your album -- whether you're a metalhead, suburban stoner, glue-sniffing gutter-punk, electroclash fashionista, new-wave spazz, hoodie skate-rat, indie-rock academic, geriatric Deep Purple fan, or whether you've just been jonesin' for an intelligent, uncompromising but accessible rock record to rival Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf or the first Foo Fighters album.

But You're a Woman, I'm a Machine is a sweatbox dance party where the hosts often find themselves drinking alone. Given DFA79's muscular physicality -- not to mention their porn-star 'staches -- it's easy to interpret the title as a phallus-asserting mission statement to be airbrushed onto the side of a shaggin' wagon. However, as Keeler explains, it's more an expression of vulnerability than virility.

"People in other bands are blown away by what we've accomplished, and I just remind them, 'You guys still have jobs, you have a life, you have pets but we have nothing.' We don't even have hot water, because we've just let everything go for this. This is our whole life right now."

And with each additional gig, each record sold, each after-party thrown, DFA79 find themselves encountering the "Dead Womb" scenario like some perpetual Groundhog Day fever dream -- their visions of white picket fences fading into powdered white lines. Says Grainger, "People who are supposed to know what our band is about have offered us cocaine and we're like, 'What the fuck are you doing? Can you not hear?'"

Tellingly, when Grainger hollers the word "babaaay!" on the record, he's not talking about a fantasy babe in a bikini. He'd rather have the kind that wears diapers.

"My goal is still to have a big house with no neighbours and a piano in my kitchen and a dog and some babies and a fucking horse," he says. "But the more we progress in this band, the more distant that reality becomes. I went from liking girls with no make-up and no tattoos to liking girls with shorter skirts and more tattoos -- what's happened to me! We've gained a lot in this band, but there have been so many casualties along the way -- our women have been lost to this band."

Adds Keeler, "Even the guy that produced and engineered the record, Al-P, his girlfriend that was there at the beginning of the recording was also gone. There were times when we recorded and it became like men's group therapy!"

So are Death from Above 1979 the new Promise Keepers of rock, disavowing party-hard machismo for sensitive-guy serenity?

"Did we gain nothing from so many years of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who did so much to show us you don't have to be Bon Scott?," Keeler replies. "Not that I don't love Bon Scott or Keith Moon, but I don't believe you have to be a drunk womanizer to be in a successful rock band."

"It's easy to discredit the macho-brute thing on my side," Grainger says. "If you do a Google search on me, one of the first things that comes up is that I play in a children's theatre group. I was at my dad's house recently, and I was holding his lady friend's baby daughter and she was like, 'Can you believe it? The rock guy's being sensitive, holding a baby.' Why not? I love babies!"