Picture this for a moment, irrelevant as it may seem:
You’re sitting in a twenty-four-hour downtown Boston diner, looking down at the marbled splendor of a sparkly blue table that matches the color scheme of the entire place. You’re waiting for a train that will be here in an hour or so, but you have more pressing concerns as you nurse your cup of coffee (in its blue mug, of course) – the people in here think you’re either insane or maybe on drugs. But in reality, you’re a quiet kid who’s never so much touched a drink at this point in his life, much less anything else, so… why exactly is that?
Well, the year is 2014 and you’ve just taken a subway ride and hobbled over to South St. Diner after one of the most kickass shows of your young life. A band you’ve followed for a bit, Death From Above 1979, just played a show at the House of Blues, ten years on from the release of their earth-shattering album, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine. It was an iconic thing: the pastel-pink cover featuring the two members of the band stylized with elephant trunks emanating from their faces segued into a testament to the power of what two people can do, both on a record and on-stage. The tenth anniversary also roughly coincided with the release of their sophomore effort, The Physical World, so it was doubly a cause for celebration.
You were young enough to make it there early enough to get to the front row – and not cede the spot due to a weary bladder, sore feet, or any of the other factors that encroach with age. Looking at the stage, drummer and singer Sebastien Grainger sat at his throne to your right, and to your left was statuesque Jesse Keeler, wielding a translucent bass guitar he would often turn towards his giant amplifier to generate feedback, an essential piece of this noisy rock triumph. The Physical World was less than three months old at this point, so your focus was on YAWIAM, for the formative role it played in your enjoyment of music, as well as how you’d internalized its lyrics far more than anything else.
The show was stunning – both in the figurative and literal senses. It was only your thirty-seventh show in your entire life, and at the ripe young age of twenty-two, you figured your eardrums would never really be susceptible to damage. (You had seen Swans earlier in the year, however, so this assumption was, in the common parlance, Very Stupid.) Thus, the predictable occurred: you had a great time, braced yourself against the barrier rail as everyone crashed around you, and then, in the aftermath, found the relative quiet on the Green Line to South Station to be extra-quiet – the enormity of DFA1979’s set had done a number on your ears.
With a while to wait for your train, you headed on exhausted legs to a nearby diner. Your frazzled senses walked in, heard the people talking in the booths, the faint dialogue from the TV in the far corner, and every other big and little thing; all of a sudden the waitress was looking at you strangely as you answered a question she most definitely had not asked, judging by the puzzled and increasingly-concerned look that crept over her face as you tried to salvage the exchange. Near was far, far was near, at least as far as your eardrums were concerned – but, scuffed auditory processing aside, you managed to get a cup of coffee, gulp it down in spite of its temperature, and head on over to wait, stunned, in the train station proper. But that experience stays with you for a while: the overwhelming embarrassment of the moment, as well as how it marks one of the most sheerly powerful gigs you’ve ever seen.
Switching tenses: I recently visited that diner once again, after more than a decade, thankfully not straight from a gig – but also after many years of habitually wearing ear protection, a practice I truly cannot recommend enough. It’s a nice spot – coffee’s decent, TV in the same place it was 10 years ago, and you can get a beer til 1am on a Sunday. There are even vegan options for weirdos like me. This time I’ve come from a plane – though a week and change prior, on the opposite coast, I’ve had the privilege of seeing DFA1979 play the entirety of You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine as part of a 20th-anniversary tour that headed to my temporary home of San Francisco, hence this moronic anecdote.
The tour is a testament to the enduring appeal of the ‘04 record: it helped define the sound of this millennium, and the fact that it was only two guys at the helm simply made the feat all the more impressive (the credential for the gig shows the album’s art as part of an emblem that winkingly declares the duo, in block letters, “CANADA’S ONLY PUNK BAND”). It absolutely warrants this start-to-finish reinvigoration; there are the obvious standouts, like ‘Turn It Out’, ‘Romantic Rights’, and the title track – but the full playthrough lets one bask in the excellence of everything. For all its sub-two-minute brevity, the auditory whiplash of ‘Pull Out’ remains one of the best tracks on the album.
But while no one really needs reminding that YAWIAM is a modern masterpiece, the second half of the evening, as well as the encore, allows for the rest of the band’s discography to shine as well. Death From Above 1979 were, for all their strengths, a band that was paradoxically hampered by the comparison of every single following thing to their stellar debut – but twenty years later, even on a tour dedicated to their opus, enough time has passed to let everything else breathe. Looking back to The Physical World, itself now celebrating ten years, ‘Trainwreck 1979’ and ‘White is Red’ stand out as particularly memorable cuts, and two tracks from their most recent work, 2021’s [DFA1979] Is 4 Lovers demonstrate their evolution as Keeler continues his assumed further role on synth. Courtesy of time and the band’s persistent efforts, an anniversary tour for what was once viewed as their monolithic success also provides comprehensive insight into what they’ve been up to since; spotlighting a band that defined themselves at the crux of the century but refused to stop messing on. It’s a glorious revisitation of their landmark debut – yet also genuinely exciting when they catch up to the present.
Photos and words by Collin Heroux
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