Start up a conversation about Canadian indie music with Sebastien Grainger, and he'll be more than happy to talk about the greats. This could extend to his own experience as the drummer/vocalist for mondo-distorted Toronto duo Death From Above 1979, but when he's first caught on his cell phone out in Sudbury, Ontario, he reports that he'd just seen a classic performance from mighty, Maritimes-bred foursome, Sloan.
"I was just kind of randomly creeping Sloan online and saw that they were doing their One Chord to Another 20th anniversary tour, playing that record front to back," he tells Westender, adding that he was in town visiting his brother. "They played at the Townehouse, which is a tiny tavern in Sudbury – kind of a surreal way to see a band play a record that was so important to me in such a small setting. It sounded incredible!"
While his old heroes are hitting intimate venues for their current tour, Death From Above 1979 only seem to be getting bigger as the years go on. Next week, the band plays its largest show in Vancouver to date, co-headlining the PNE Forum with Eagles of Death Metal. It's taken 15 years and one break-up to get there, though.
First founded in the early '00s between housemates Grainger and bassist Jesse Keeler, their first show was for a dozen people in a Long Island attic apartment. After hooking up with since-shelved Vancouver imprint Ache Records for their 2003 debut EP, Heads Up, the twosome began flooding the West Coast every few months to play a series of small gigs at venues like the long-gone Piccadilly Pub and Mesa Luna, not to mention the messy bedroom area of East Van punk spot the Alf House.
"Aside from the fact that Ache Records was putting out our music, it was so cheap for us to travel because there was only two of us. And we'd borrow gear. One of our parents had all these airline points accumulated through her company. It probably cost us $100 between the two of us to get to Vancouver," Grainger explains of the duo's time in town. "We were able to go and play with those bands, and be more involved in the Vancouver scene, at a certain point, than Toronto."
The band went supernova in 2004 via the release of their You're a Woman, I'm a Machine LP, with songs like lead single "Romantic Rights" blasting by via furiously-fuzzed out bass melodies, dance-punk rhythms and Grainger's confident croon. But two years of touring the world disintegrated the bonds between Keeler and Grainger, leading to a break-up in 2006.
Keeler would work on his house project MSTRKRFT and Grainger issued an album with his band, the Mountains, but by 2011 the two had patched things up for a reunion tour. Quickly, though, the unit realized they had more to offer than their greatest hits. Enter the band's 2014 comeback album, The Physical World.
"After about a year we started to feel like the good will of the reunion was waning, and now we were just a band. That's why we started working on a new record," the drummer reveals. "We're a band playing, having fun. It's not enough to be doing the victory lap."
While certainly tapping into the in-the-red awesomeness of their early catalogue, The Physical World pushes Death From Above 1979 into differing extremes. "Right On, Frankenstein" is a rapidly-paced piece that initially showcases Grainger's melodic sneer before exploding into a moshed-up finale of gun turret-quick bass noodling. Though technically still doused in ear-obliterating distortion, "White is Red" is a comparatively mellow-grooved musing on lost love. With its shouted refrain of "Nobody knows anything at 21," "Government Trash," is another rager that finds Keeler running wild on his bass, and suggests the band's second phase sees them wiser.
"You can extrapolate that statement pretty much across any age," Grainger admits, adding with a laugh, "Looking back, I had a bunch of stupid ideas. [But] I'm sure in 10 years I'll look back at this time in my life and think 'what a dum-dum.'"
With The Physical World having picked up Rock Album of the Year at the Juno Awards earlier this month, and the group about to undertake an arena tour with Eagles of Death Metal, Death From Above 1979 seems to be even more popular than before. But while Grainger admits that getting bigger was always the M.O., he seems humbled by the hype.
"As a ‘rock star’ you're supposed to treat your audience like they're yours. When I see our audience, we're just borrowing them for this show. We're one band on the playlist. I don't see a Death From Above fan as a person that is unique to us. It's a strange relationship."
When a rowdy throng of die-hard supporters show up in the front row of the Forum wearing the band's iconic, elephant-nosed logo on their t-shirts, things are bound to get even stranger.
• Death From Above 1979 plays the PNE Forum this Tuesday (April 26)
