Album Review: Death From Above 1979 – The Physical World
Courtesy of Ilia Rogatchevski
★★★★
It is an incredibly bold decision to follow up a phenomenal debut like You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine. No one would have blamed the Toronto two-piece for prematurely murdering this ballsy project and leaving it buried back in the mid-noughties. Mysterious implosions are, after all, how many-a-band-myth is generated. Death From Above 1979 were guaranteed a shiny throne in the hearts of all those kids still nostalgic for the days when one beer got them drunk, no matter what their post-break-up projects sounded like. So fans of the group can be forgiven for being apprehensive at their return, but should be gently encouraged to give the record a couple of spins.
The album opens with ‘Cheap Talk’, a damaged fridge door flailing like a hot tail, making warm, umber stains on the kitchenette linoleum. Jesse F. Keeler and his bass cavort a misleading masquerade. Little neon accents puncture through his maple corset, flaying around like a couple of copulating elephants. Ample sonic links are scattered throughout the album, hiding beneath the boulder avalanche; striving for one coherent whole.
We are finding ourselves sinking into an alienated and disenfranchised century, but even this despicable hell needs some disco. ‘Trainwreck 1979’ would do equally well performed at a mob funeral as it would accompanying a Range Rover commercial. Just imagine that insalubrious smile wearing its best merino sweater, pretending to master sweeping curves, (which just do not exist in built-up urban areas, by the way) while “Cos I want it all! I can’t get enough!” assaults your senses from out of the looking glass. It’s a dark future, but what a future.
The lyrical themes prevalent on the album – heartbreak, obsession, loss of innocence et al – are as ubiquitous and complex as a Rubik’s Cube. Yet the duo manage to balance the contrast between the beautiful and the profane. Yes, in many ways, this is meth head dance music, but it is specifically catered to pieces of steak who wear flowers in their hair. ‘White Is Red’ tells the story of Americana heartbreak and could easily serve as a treatment for a Richard Linklater movie: red cups of cheap booze scattered on a tired lawn; the first paranoid drag of abhorrent weed; Pontiac mullets riding into a celluloid dawn; that strange point in time when Aerosmith were still kind of cool. Sebastien Grainger plays with patent metaphors, which are too often found in popular music, but the song’s subtle beauty lives in the imagery evoked by the author’s eloquent tenor.
The title track closes the album and it is a dark and brooding one. Ironically, it charges in with a riot of digital saturation, before quickly establishing itself as a summative evaluation of everything that had preceded it. It is as if DFA’79 are trying to warn us that soon, the lasers at the roller disco will get tired of their slavish existence and start maiming horny teenagers. Whereas their debut was the perfect record to have an inebriated fuck to, The Physical World is closer to resembling an audio accompaniment to the morning after. The beer goggles have been polished, the mysterious flat abandoned and just as the splitting headache abates, tragic memories come pouncing to the fore. For all their bubblegum focus, these songs have the potential to sweep unnoticed beneath your eyelids and grow into beautiful tumours. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been away, the ability to compose songs that get under your skin while they mug you by the urinals, is an admirable power indeed.
Death From Above 1979 are currently on tour and The Physical World is set for release on 9 September via Last Gang Records.
RELATED:
