Obsession: Death From Above 1979

Anyone who's read the coffee chapter of my book already knows what this band is capable of. Clearly one of the more inspired things I've written in a while (not as difficult task as it may seem given the drivel I pump out week after week on this blog), I can honestly say that not a single word of it was written by me, but by the catalytic reaction of the dark brew itself mixing in my mind with repeated listens to this band, Death From Above 1979.

The comparisons drawn by Pitchfork of DFA79 to their labelmates on VICE records, A.R.E. Weapons, are certainly apt. DFA79 play the sort of midnight funk-laden noise/rock that obliterates the thin divide between sex and death, and they do it with but two members to boot. Like a fine wine made of gasoline, cracking the bottle of their 2004 LP You're a Woman, I'm a Man conjures untold visions of dirt-chucking rockers of the past, from the deep Southwestern bass-metal of Kyuss to Thurston Moore's solo album to Lightning Bolt, Harry Pussy, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and, why the fuck not, Janis Joplin.

Like filling your mouth with whiskey and spitting it in the air, not showering for three weeks straight, letting mold grow in your forty bottles as you draw tits on your TV screen with a Sharpie, eating ramen and climbing a tree to puke cheap carcino-noodles on a sleeping pile of vampire bats, or getting your fourth straight enema at the foot of an afterburning ramjet, DFA79 launch uninspected ICBM's into the narcosphere of radical low-chakra consciousness, burning through octopus dens and magma men on their way down, down, down to the bottom of Love.

Indeed, the duo from Toronto have that rock jouissance in spades, but the album title bespeaks a darker philosophy burbling somewhere beneath the surface. We might think first of FuckingMachines.com, yet the title isn't so much a monologue made by a robot, but an acknowledgement that, yes, humans (men at least) have been machines all along, slaves to the inescable programming of their loins, incapable of a single original thought nor action untainted by the stench of, heavens to betsy, SEX and DEATH.

But at least they have mustaches.

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