Canadian two-piece Death From Above (recently dropping the 1979 suffix) is often slotted in with acts from the mid-2000s electro scene like Justice, Digitalism, Mr Oizo and MSTRKFT but this is wholly incorrect and a very lazy form of generalising by the online music journalism fraternity.
This common misnomer came from an incorrect assumption that ‘They were regularly associated with electro acts, therefore, they must sound like them.’
The truth is, their music is loud and abrasive and more at home next to Motorhead than banging beats, however, this incorrect association saw the band headline Australian dance festival Parklife in 2011 alongside Lykke Li, Ten Snake and Ducksauce. Lead singer and drummer Sebastian Grainger still seems stung with disbelief as he recalls his band’s last trip to Australia.
“On our first tour of Australia in 2005 we played places like Ding Dong and then this bar that was above like this African store, I think it was on Smith Street, Collingwood. There was real vibe for that tour so going from that memory to playing outdoor in the afternoon at basically a rave was a bit strange.”
The Parklife tour was following the band’s 2011 reformation after going on hiatus in 2006. This break came online five years after the band’s inception in 2001 in Toronto, when bass player Jesse F. Keeler was looking for a drummer to join his hardcore punk band Femme Fatale.
The aforementioned cultural alignment to electro in the early ‘00s was because Death From Above were making their way in a music scene where the rules had been thrown out the window, a punk spirit if you will. And for those playing at home, yes the band’s bass player Jesse F. Keeler is one-half of MSTRKRFT.
Their latest album Outrage! Is Now is a rock epic that on most tracks, like the title track, trades the tempo of their previous albums – debut You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine (2000) and 2012’s post-hiatus The Physical World –for a grandiose epic rock sound.
This makes for a solid musical landscape packed with lyrical content that makes a bold statement about a post-social media society. “The song Outrage! Is Now has to do with the phenomenon of people fundamentally disagreeing on things and not being able to have conversations,” Grainger says. “They come to the conversation with an absolute idea and then they’re not able to budge on things, so people who would otherwise agree with 90% of that person’s ideas, that last ten percent is so toxic that they can’t walk away from the conversation and be friends anymore.”
He now expands further on the oxymoronic nature of online activism like Facebook shaming. “There are certain phrases that people say and they just take them as fact. They’ll say something that is basically a meme and they’ll expect you to agree with them. But they’re assuming that everyone agrees with that statement,” Grainger leaves that point hanging before delving into the specifics. “I get why people aren’t into Donald Trump, believe me, I understand it. But a lot of the time you will see people so upset about it and then they’ll be asked a specific question about what about Trump exactly upsets them and then they can’t defend it, they’re just upset about the whole thing.”
He now turns his attention back to why he wrote this song and touches on one of the important roles of artists, regardless of their discipline in our society. “When I wrote the song I remember a friend of mine saying ‘All this is going to die down.’ Fat chance. It’s only getting more insane and as an artist freedom is everything for me and freedom of speech is paramount.
“I don’t know how constitutional it is in Australia but in Canada it isn’t, it’s part of the ethos but it is not written into the DNA whereas in America it is. It’s such a hit button topic that any artist, comedian, actor, writer, journalist’s number one priority is to defend that right, because that right enables you to talk about bad ideas and figure out why they’re bad.”
