Death From Above
After a painfully long wait, Death From Above swagger back onto a Montreal stage. This time it’s the dusky Corona Theatre. Bearded men and smartly tattooed women congregate for a feast of riffs and a side helping of fuzzy pick scrapes.
Newest record Is 4 Lovers standout MODERN GUY announces the arrival of the object of our affection. The first two or three songs whizz by us so fast we barely have time to miss the old days.
I first saw them in a tiny pub in Saint John New Brunswick in 2004, and this will be my 4th time. Something I love about this incarnation of the band is the unexpected use of pretty sounds. Twinkly piano just removes the burrs of the knife edge. Of course there is no toughness lost. Only the rudely confident assimilation of whatever an innovator and a tastemaker would choose to put in his toolbox. Death From Above still cut.
Stagewise, I constantly feel a blade runner or THX of 2001 space odyssey vibe. Through an 8-bit Nintendo filter. It’s always Sci-Fi robots mated with lumberjacks riding elephants with these guys.
Squelch and squeak meet precision tik tik tika tik. Purity and passion. Art and aggression. Pulse to lurch to. Hooks to surge to. Feelings to rise to meet. Like a Tron cycle racing through the streets of Hobbiton.
Sebastien Grainger sings so hard my soft palate aches in sympathy. Half this band’s hooks are made of his yelps connecting perfectly with his snare hits.
Keeler’s bass whips around in circles like a mystery marsupial in a cornfield. What is IT?! Is that a wombat? Did a goat get loose? I can’t tell from the way the stalks are separating in the moonlight. By morning a news team will be there interviewing a local who seems sure it was Death From Above who created this crop circle. He won’t be wrong, but he’ll sure seem a bit off.
4th song TURN IT OUT takes us back to 2004! Man, those early songs can get people cracked open! As good as the new songs are, they still just hit different.
These songs are flying by like lightning. You know you could tease some of these out boys? Every moment is packed so tight.
Sebastien gives opening act the OBGMs some love and says he feels like he needs to step up his crowd work after watching them. Thankfully, he does it his way.
GOING STEADY has all the power it ever did. “My brother has a baby oh and one day she’ll save me” still don’t know what it means. Still doesn’t matter; I feel burrowed electricity buzzing in my ribs. Oh! Oh! But now Sebastion explains it- his brother has a daughter, he wrote the lyrics when she was just a baby, but he wondered later, ‘oh my god, how is she going to save me? How does that come about?’ Well, currently, she’s studying to be a nurse, so the story continues to unfold! Very cool!!
It’s amazing to be in a room where a band is recreating bizarre sounds, and a huge percentage of the crowd knows from the weird sound what the song is. It always feels good to be with community. It feels like all the outsiders came inside for a bit, and we all have this thing.
Death From Above can give you that. If you’ve listened to their records and never seen them, do yourself a favour (and make yourself wish you’d gone sooner) and see them in as small a place as you can and get as close.
I love how much cowbell BLOOD ON OUR HANDS has, it’s the perfect amount of cowbell. Just right for those moments when you aren’t screaming your lungs out. Oh, I feel for the guy! Wow, his vocal cords must look like brisket.
The crowd is grooving tonight. Stank faces all over the place.
Sebastien wants his Adele moment. Standing in the soft blue spotlight. Cymbals still rattling from the last song. This is meant to be pretty, but regretfully it’s not great. The crowd was kind, but the piano playing was inconsistent and the singing warbly. I would love for them to have this gear, but I don’t think they do.
He wins us back with audience participation. He tells us to look at our partner and make sexy, heaving breath sounds, and it’s surprisingly (no, not surprisingly) really fun. Just like the rest of TRAINWRECK 1979.
Dang, Jesse Keeler looks cool singing! Like he’s made of steel leaning all bad, bad, man into a straight mic stand (none of this silly angled arm mic stand business, he’s a rock star).
Seamless transition into ROMANTIC RIGHTS. Everyone in the crowd is spent! After the band is done. The audience realizes they are also done. Just. Done. Or are we?
Some of us unwisely left while the rest of us were pretending we were at a football match, yelling ‘ole ole ole oleee’.
I confess some of these songs, I can’t tell them apart for the lack of vocal memories. But the last song is played extra fast because there are smoked meat sandwiches in the back. We can’t blame them. Everyone in the pit leaves it all in the pit. Everyone in the stands relishes the encore.
Verdict: 7 trunks out of 10. We have welcomed the return, and now we must wait again.
Here are my thoughts on the opening act!:
The OBGMS
The OBGMs open by declaring, “we’re a folk band,” and they are decidedly not. They get the crowd up immediately. Song two, and the lead singer gets down in the crowd. He is adrenaline incarnate. Like Chuck d on speed, “we don’t have time to play around” he leads us in a chant of “you can bring me Elsa,” or is it “you can meet me outside”? Classic rock lead lines from the guitarist. Melodic backing vocals from the bass player. I like it, it’s fun.
I do like this band. Elements of pop-punk, thrash, as I mentioned, classic rock, rapping (but rapping with a barked ferocity) post-punk, New York scene rock. All done up like they threw spaghetti at the wall, saw what stuck and picked up the stuff that didn’t. Cooked it a second and threw it again.
Interpol verse, Weezer chorus, Speed metal bridge. Next song, same beautiful formula. Different influences mashed up hard.
The singer has a lot of demands from the crowd. He wants everyone to leave left or right on command… will they? I wonder? Yeah, I guess… for a second… it’s a bit gimmicky.
Seemingly they define themselves by what they are not. They don’t have friends, they aren’t in relationships, they aren’t folk, they aren’t R&B, they aren’t Marvin Gaye, they aren’t Celine Dion. But, Montreal Rockers, they are SOMETHING.
Verdict: 5 plot twists out of 10, fun band, probably even better as the headliner in a venue where everyone is there to simply see them.
Review – Mike Rogers
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