Death From Above’s Grainger issues solo LP, shrugs off comparisons to DFA
Posted Nov 14, 2013 01:18:04 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – Sebastien Grainger knows that some listeners will never be able to separate his fluorescent, ’80s-tinged solo work from his ongoing output in well-loved Toronto noise-dance duo Death From Above 1979.
So he’s devised a simple formula as he awaits reviews of his latest record, “Yours to Discover,” available this week.
“I realize that I’m always going to get a point taken off for it not being Death From Above — at least one point on a scale of 10,” he says with a laugh down the line from Los Angeles. “If it’s an eight, it’ll be a seven. That’s just the way it’s going to be and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not going to complain or be bummed out about it.
“I’ll just always add one point. I add it back in my own mind.”
Still, Grainger points out, his solo work is “a completely separate statement.”
“It couldn’t get more different,” he continues. “So in a perfect world I’d want to be judged separately. It’s like the child of a star actor.”
The vastly different sound of Grainger’s vibrant solo disc was a conscious choice, given that he’s still ensconced with old partner Jesse Keeler on crafting a follow-up to their lone, gold-certified 2004 disc “You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine.” So distinguishing between the two projects was important (he’s also working on another album with Josh Reichmann under the Deserts moniker), and at the same time Grainger wanted a sound unified enough that the disc wouldn’t seem “schizophrenic.”
He achieved that by digging deeper into his influences — such artists as Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers and Chic, Prince and Michael Jackson. Thus the shimmering cool of “I’m Looking for a Hand,” the champagne-fizzy come-on “Your Body Works” and the sublime new wave highlight “Going With You,” which Grainger sums up as “such a monster.”
“It’s more aligned with what my tastes actually are than anything else,” says Grainger, whose work with Death From Above is similarly danceable but coated in pummelling fuzz.
“I don’t sit around and listen to rock music, really, and I rarely listen to heavy music. I love making it, but it’s not something I get off listening to that often. Every now and then I’ll put it on, but it’s rare.”
About a year ago, Grainger moved from Toronto to Los Angeles, but his old home still influenced the content of his new record.
A longtime resident of Ossington Avenue — once one of the downtown’s grittiest strips, now an adult playground of chic clothing stores, trendy restaurants and hip bars — he wanted to explore gentrification without black-and-white moralizing on “The Streets Are Still a Mess,” howling in the chorus: “If the city don’t change, if the city don’t grow/ Where will new people go?”
“I remember when I first started going to the west end ages ago, Ossington was terrifying — the streetlights were really dim and it was super dark and sketchy … Vietnamese and Portuguese gangsters up and down, grow ops, all those things,” he says. “I witnessed the street gentrify and flourish and that’s totally fine, that’s what happens in cities. And everyone seems to lament it. Early adopters of the neighbourhood were like, ‘All these yuppies are moving in.’ And it’s like, you did that too a little bit.
“It’s about taking responsibility for it but also questioning, if I’m moving to a house that used to have 10-15 immigrants living in it … where do they go?”
Still, he’s finding his new environs in Los Angeles inspiring as well.
After years in Toronto, he started to worry he was becoming too comfortable. And relocating into relative isolation helped direct his focus back to music.
“You sever yourself from your social life in a way, so you become a bit more of a hermit here than I was in Toronto,” he says. “It was just so easy to go out as much as I wanted to, which was every night sometimes.
“Everything’s deliberate here,” he adds of L.A., notably less pedestrian-friendly. “You kind of have to plan it out. I would walk out of my front door and get swept out into a night in Toronto, leave the house at 11 and then be back in bed at like 6 in the morning. That does not happen here.
“If I leave my house at 11, it’s to take the garbage out.”
Meanwhile, Grainger says that he and Keeler aren’t putting a strict timeline on the new Death From Above record, but he’s relishing the reunion with his old partner.
“It’s the most fun I could ever have,” he says. “I don’t have any other collaborators really. I’ve collaborated with a few people, but it only kind of works for me. Death From Above is my greatest collaboration.”
When Grainger first ventured out beyond the confines of that duo for a 2008 LP under the name Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains, the constant comparisons to Death From Above got under his skin — particularly since DFA had split two years prior.
Now that Death From Above is a going concern, he’s less ruffled by his inability to get away from his other act.
“It doesn’t bother me. It used to bother me. It bothered me on the first record, because I was trying to make a statement completely separate from Death From Above,” he explains.
“Now, Death From Above is a functional thing and I’m proud of it. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. So I don’t feel like I’m competing with it anymore.”
