Premature Evaluation: Death From Above 1979 The Physical World — stereogum.com

Sep 3rd '14 by Tom Breihan @ 9:50am10 Comments A decade ago, when Death From Above 1979 first stalked the earth, it was hard to know what to do with them. They weren’t dance-punk, and they weren’t noise-rock, though if you squinted hard enough, they were both. They had the same personnel setup as Lightning Bolt, and they played loud riffs like Lightning Bolt, but they also had hooks and choruses and riffs that weren’t tripping all over themselves to gouge you in the ear with a rusty screwdriver. They had songs about sex that weren’t even remotely turning sex into a joke, an unheard-of thing in indie rock then (and now). They’d added the “1979″ to their name partly because James Murphy threatened legal action but also partly because both dudes were born in 1979 and because 1979 was supposedly the last time pop music had been good, with Off The Wall and what have you. (These days, 2004, compared to today, looks like some lost pop-music golden era. OutKast! Timbaland! Peak Usher! You didn’t know what you had, DFA guys!) DFA1979 looked more comfortable onstage at Madison Square Garden, where I saw them open for Nine Inch Nails, than they did at the mostly-empty Baltimore club where I first saw them. And when they played the first Pitchfork Festival in 2005, back when it was still calling itself the Intonation Festival, they were the one band who punched through the prevailing sunny vibe, the weird euphoria that this thing on the internet had somehow convinced thousands of people to come to a park in Chicago to watch weird bands. They were the one band on the bill who actively made fun of the audience, and the one band on the bill who incited a moshpit big enough to kick up baseball-field dust that got caught in everyone’s throats. But if DFA1979 were a band out of time in 2004, when they released their now-classic You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine, they’re even more out of time now that they’ve finally gotten around to following it up.

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