The students packing out the Academy could care less whether the reformation of cult noise duo Death From Above 1979 turns out to be a particularly fruitful or indeed lasting one. After five years apart, the chance to merely experience their famously riotous gigs on this occasion is enough to be thankful for.
The Canadian twosome, comprised of drumming vocalist Jesse Keeler and synth player / bassist Sebastien Grainger briefly set the indie music world ablaze in the mid-2000s with their stand-alone chainsaw dance-rock massacre of an album ‘You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine’ before imploding in 2006, leaving behind their painfully few recordings and the folklore of their legendary performances.
Their popularity has unquestionably soared in the years since their disbandment, allowing the album’s status as a certain classic of the last decade to bloom into rightfully mythical levels of revere.
It was with little surprise then that their January announcement to get the old band back together and hit the road again caused more than a flurry amongst chin-tickling tastemakers. This, their return jaunt to the UK after a few preliminary dates in May, sees the Academy swarming from end to end and while it’s easy to appreciate why, nothing prepared us for this kind of attendance.
The sense of giddy anticipation is bludgeoned to the back of our minds by the smartly attired Exeter punkabillys The Computers. Visibly relishing the opportunity, with thrashy garage riffing and jangly 50s jukebox rhythms, they have us alternately moshing and jiving our way through a half-hour hardcore hoedown.
For a night of such expectations it’s everything you’d want and more from a support who can’t quite believe their luck and are barely able to contain their zealous enthusiasm.
With his one-liners and soulful attitude at odds with his gullet-shredding hollering, their frontman is a hit with the crowd, leading off twelve bar punk knees-ups like ‘Rhythm Revue‘ before gutting the limp husk squall of ‘Music Is Dead‘ and stuffing it, taxidermist-style, full of funky-dory rockabilly. We’ve never shaken, rattled or indeed rolled so damn angrily.
DFA1979 arrive through a befitting smog of ear-splitting scuzz against a tombstone backdrop pronouncing their original lifespan, echoing again the ambiguity over their future.
The moment ‘Turn It Out‘ revs its distorted metallic disco into gear though, all uncertainty is once again an irrelevant concern. It’s anarchy wall-to-wall, a seamless sea of sex and violence, disco dancing and hell raising.
‘Black History Month‘ and ‘Blood On Our Hands‘ display enough grit to liquefy polar ice caps, and while this comeback display mightn’t be a particularly affectionate nor interaction-heavy one, musically DFA1979 are air-capsule tight and the distant coolness with which they play only adds to their appeal.
The meat-cleaving basslines and heft-heavy drums repossess and reprogram every set of hips in the room to the robotic rave rock of ‘Little Girl‘ through to ‘Romantic Right‘, it’s a kinetic takeover that no one really has the answer to, no one can figure out how to fight it, the crowd is beyond powerless. With each dancefloor-ready, heft-heavy surge that runs through their pelvis-centric punk raves the listener runs the risk of an acne breakout for trying to physically withstand the noise.
Jack and Meg may be gone but with the popularity of the likes of Sleigh Bells, Black Keys, Middle Class Rut and Japandroids, to name a handful, it would seem that loudness-loving duos are as in vogue as ever, and while no one quite knows what these dates may lead to, like The Computers the crowd know to cherish every deliciously dirty second they’ve been fortunate to experience tonight.
And on the evidence of what one show can create, we too hope they’ll decide to stick around a little bit longer.
(Daniel Robinson)
