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Life after Death
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During the “Canadian music explosion” a while back, a band that got a lot of ink spilled on them—alongside Metric, Stars, Broken Social Scene, the Dears etc.—was Toronto’s Death From Above 1979. The duo made up of bassist Jesse F. Keeler and drummer Sebastian Grainger stormed out of Canada with a sound that was decidedly more aggressive than their compatriots, while putting the punk back into “dance punk.” Two years after shaking up the world, the duo surprisingly called it a day in the summer of 2006, with Keeler concentrating on his electronic band MSTRKRFT, alongside producer/engineer Al P. While Keeler’s new band quickly staked their claim with a mess of remixes for the likes of the Gossip and Bloc Party, a debut record and a lot of touring, very little was heard from Grainger. “I guess I just got sick of playing in my old band, and I translated that into just being sick of playing in general,” says Grainger. “Once this band finally got together, we got a lot of offers from labels but I didn’t want to rush anything and I guess part of me wanted to wait out the wake of my old band. On a career level, it would’ve been smart, using the momentum gained from Death From Above and getting something out quick, but I think that would’ve really been a cheap move and I wanted to make something that could stand up on its own. I think that I have really exorcised any negative feelings I had for my old band and just look back at it now with fond memories. I really feel happy to be doing what I’m doing right now and I think I have learned from my past mistakes.” The eponymous debut from Grainger and his band the Mountains is surely worth the wait, and while Grainger’s falsetto-enhanced crooning should be familiar to any fan of his old band, his songwriting has matured by leaps and bounds. It now has very little to do with Death From Above 1979’s death-disco stomp. Shades of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy and Roxy Music’s Eno phase make an appearance while his take on disco sidesteps clever irony and shoots right from the heart of Nile Rogers. Grainger also wears his heart more on his sleeve this time around while adding the personal touch by playing almost all of the instruments on the record as well as engineering and producing. “I kind of got rid of any notion of what I should be doing and just wanted to let things happen really naturally for this record. I share a recording studio with James Shaw [of Metric] and initially he started producing the record, but I quickly realized that I wasn’t very good at communicating what I wanted and what I didn’t want. When I started doing the record by myself, I was just able to go for the sound and ideas I wanted a lot quicker. I’m kind of an obsessive person in the studio and when I realized that this record was not going to be a band in the room, which we did try, I was able to give myself more space and not be self-conscious about anything. Having said that, though, I really am working towards recording a whole band together in a room because that’s still the ultimate way to record—but sometimes it’s hard to get somebody down to the studio at 2 a.m. when you have an idea for something.” WITH GUESTS AT IL MOTORE ON |
