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Death From Above 1979, Electric Ballroom, Camden

  • Published in Live

From to De Sade to Ballard, the idea that the body is a system of organic cogs and connectors with a very basic set of primary instincts is an old one, and in the modern age of prosthetics, wearable tech and augmented reality it’s becoming increasingly hard to see the divisions between man and the machine. This is a subject that obviously concerns post-electro-stoner-pop-hardcore band, Death From Above 1979, essentially a throbbing mass of impulses so electronic in sound and industrial in action that it’s sometimes hard to tell which bits is the instrument. And to an almost Kate Bush-level of online furore (THERE WERE LOTS OF TWEETS IN CAPITAL LETTERS), after a 10 year ‘hiatus’ they have returned.

Camden’s Electric Ballroom plays sticky-floored host to the two-piece tonight, and watching their silhouettes yawning like snakes and moving up and down, both guitarist and drummer move like industrial pistons. New album The Physical World is loud anyway, and live it’s so uncomfortably loud that it sounds like one of them has slipped back into the venue half an hour after the sound check and turned all of the knobs up. Jessie Keeler’s bass moves hell for leather - particularly on debut album title track midway through the set, which opens with a bass riff so fast and punishing you think your eyes are going to fall out. ‘You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine’ is not so much a wistful declaration of emotional coldness as it is an aggressive statement of intent. Combined with which, the uncanny stillness of Grainger working at the drums gives off the impression that his arms are simply mechanical extensions of the sticks. Even the sound is industrial, loud like a factory, repetitive like a machine.

DFA are back with Physical World, and whatever the reasons for the reunion (it’s money - ssh don’t tell anyone), they now have enough material to fill a forty-minute setlist. From opener ‘Turn It Out’ through to ‘Right On Frankenstein’ (a good four minute song that could have been a great three minute song), via highlights from both albums, DFA are pretty much the most exciting live band you could hope to see right now. However - as you look at the sausage-fest that is a DFA gig, the beers held aloft in the air, the shouting, the singing along to bass riffs (at one point in ‘Trainwreck’ with the number of bros shouting ‘DUR NUR NUR NUR NU NU’ we could have been at a Fratellis gig), it does cross your mind - is listening to DFA1979 the musical equivalent of buying a big porsche?

Despite this, when they ditch the stoner breakdowns and hit the hits, DFA becomes really effective. At times, Keeler’s basslines are baroque in their intricacy, but when a simple juggernaut guitar and drums build up, is when things really get going. From the slow-build (from loud to LOUD) of ‘Little Sister’ to the scrape and pound of ‘Romantic Rights’. You’re A Woman was a kind of horny break-up album, but in Keeler/Grainger’s hands, even the break-up songs sound like shagging songs. From the trademark elephant noses on the front of both albums (a symbol of the phallus as well as power) to the slightly less nuanced lyrics of new songs like ‘Virgins’, both albums are steeped in sex. The comparison with De Sade is apt, because one gets the feeling listening to the lyrics from debut You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine and this year’s The Physical World that Jessie Keeler and Sebastien Grainger may also be ‘connoisseurs of sexual pleasure’. “Where have all the virgins gone?” Grainger, sings on rock-stomper, ‘Virgins’. I think you fucked them mate.


The Juan MacLean - In A Dream

  • Published in Albums


DFA Records is a household name in music, and that is not without reason. LCD Soundsystem was perhaps the band for a certain subspecies of those that came of age (or aged to thirty and upwards) anywhere from ‘Losing My Edge’ up to ‘Dance Yrslf Clean’, whilst other bands from the DFA label managed to shine with a defining single or album during that span. I’m thinking The Rapture (‘House Of Jealous Lovers’), Hercules And Love Affair (‘Blind’), but surely also some of the early The Juan MacLean singles received some notoriety in the dance corner of things (thinking ‘Give Me Every Little Thing’, ‘Happy House’, ‘Feels So Good’ and others). However, eleven housefloor bangers in a row does not an album make, and with In A Dream these DFA staples again take a stab at creating an album worthy of those superb singles.

The first two songs on the album, ‘A Place Called Space’ and ‘Here I Am’, are perhaps the outliers. The opening song takes the space theme-- something that has always been at the very heart of the band-- and runs with it into space disco territory, including a psyched out guitar solo. ‘Here I Am’ actually has soulful vocals as part of the track, and they’re the first thing you’ll hear when the song starts playing, which caused me to check if I hadn’t perhaps hit the “shuffle” button by mistake. Regardless of the quality of the song, it seems to break the album’s (and perhaps even the band’s) code. Not to say a band can only do one type of thing, but if the rest of the album you craft an identity, a certain type of mood and feel, a breach of that might snap you out of that carefully crafted world.

If the second track might snap you out of it, the rest of that album will quickly and consistently lure you back in. Some of the tracks are wistful and dreamy, others are almost apathetic and detached, but all feel like the album’s cover or something by Robert Longo. They are stylish, clean, and tight, but both in terms of style and vibe so much so that it feels industrial, urban, and emotionally withdrawn and inward. Like the Men In The City series by Longo, where the men and women are all caught and bound in their working attire. However, in the dancing/falling/dying, they are free. On this album, too, the overall feel of the sounds is “countered” by the fact that you can, will, must dance to it. And in that dancing is the emotion, the physical, the freedom. In the dancing there is both the celebration of one finding love and claiming that they’ll be “running back to you” or the (emotional) dying and falling as you “seal your love in a hideaway”.

After the fast paced, swing time ‘Charlotte’ with John MacLean lamenting that “still it counts for nothing” as he bookends the guitar solo (which, in return, bookends MacLean’s verses), The Juan MacLean aim for the dancefloor one more time with ‘A Simple Design’. It is the closes thing to a bona fide house single, masterfully executed as we’ve come to expect of them. Last time around the house single was the closer of the album (that was  the formidable ‘Happy House’), but this time the ending is not a 10 minute dancathon, but a lower paced, dreamy jam, in which Nancy Whang wistfully wonders what would happen “if tomorrow there is no tomorrow”, concluding such a thing to be impossible, as the “sun can never set on our love”. And thanks to the repeat button it certainly doesn’t have to.

In A Dream is available from amazon and iTunes.

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