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Music

DFA 1979 Briefly Resuscitate Genre in Granada Appearance

Despite all the "rock is dead" commentary, Death From Above 1979 walk onto the Granada Theater stage to play to a packed room.
By Dick Sullivan |
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Rock and roll is dying, again. Or at least that’s the rumor. I suspect it’s perpetuated mostly by overreaching music writers too captivated by searchable data—mentions, clicks, views, downloads—to look up from their laptops. But the ultimate conclusion is that rock and roll has lost its primacy. And what rock and roll means if it can’t assert its own primacy is a fair question. Yet, despite all commentary, Death From Above 1979 walk onto the Granada Theater stage to play a rock and roll show to a packed room.

That Death From Above 1979 is playing at all is an achievement in itself. The duo made tidal waves in the music industry with their 2004 release You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine. Then, they split up in 2006, just as an eager fan-base awaited a sophomore follow-up from the bass-drums-vocals bulldozer of a rock band from Canada. But they just as unexpectedly reformed a decade later to record a second album, The Physical World, in 2014.

DFA 1979's Jason Keeler. Credit: Bill Ellison.
DFA 1979’s Jason Keeler. Credit: Bill Ellison.

Sebastien Grainger and Jesse Keeler are deceptively imposing men, both in physicality and musical potency. The slender Grainger towers over his drum kit, donned in his preferred stage attire of head-to-toe white. The stouter Keeler, in contrasting black, wrenches a deafening, grating note from his fuzzed-out bass and the two proceed apace, pummeling through their short, but efficacious two album catalog.

That Grainger, a Toronto artist, is perched on a drum stool and carrying lead vocal duty, is strangely appropriate. Exactly 50 years ago, another drummer-singer named Levon Helm, of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, was making rock and roll history with his Toronto bandmates. Here, Grainger is screaming where Helm might have crooned, but the two multi-instrumentalists share a DNA. They are tethered by a meandering, 50-year thread of soul.

It’s interesting to me that Death From Above added, for legal reasons, the suffix of “1979” to their name. That year capped a decade that saw rock and roll sell its birthright for a bowl of epicurean stew. Humanity entered the ‘70s on the arm of Sly Stone and left the party with Chic. If it seems like I’m arguing for a kind of rock and roll essentialism, I am, just not one tied to a categorical rationalism that thinks “rock and roll” is a comprehensible recipe. The term itself is half the problem, falling into the same impotent disrepair as “miracle.”

Death From Above 1979 is an exhibit for the mystery of rock and roll chemistry. Keeler’s MSTRKRFT project is admirable, possibly trailblazing, eclectic DJ work. Likewise, Grainger’s solo work is an alluring, mulit-faceted gem of carefree pop introspection and subversive poetry. But here, on the Granada stage, the two are an arc-flash, two poles of irrepressibility with a spike of energy between them. Apart, they may be intelligibly excellent, but together they are palpably great.

The majority of the one hour set is drawn from their new album, the appropriately titled Physical World. The album finds its mood at the anxious intersection between love, mortality, sex and hunger. It’s a kind of anti-Gnostic manifesto that finds its zenith in the creation myth “Trainwreck 1979.” The song’s simplistic, but clarion tantrum could be the odyssey of rock and roll itself: “the story never ends as long as we have blood and guts/‘cause I want it all.”

Keeler and Grainger surge on. A few stage-side observers indulge in crowd-diving. Keeler literally kicks one of them off the stage. The show careens to an end after an eardrum-snapping hour in front of a raucous audience. Half of the sweaty flock lingers for Keeler’s after-show set as MSTRKRFT. The other half pour out to the night, walking back into a world where rock is dead, once again, tomorrow.

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