As promised a blog about Death From Above 1979 and Femme Fatale:
I’m not going to go on and on about how great the music is, there’s more too it than that so I’ll keep this bit brief. Death From Above 1979 sounds like thunderous tanks rolling through the front wall of your house, pushing you up against a wall and violating you. In the best way possible. It’s loud, it’s heavy and blows your ears off, but it’s also sexy as shit and laden with pop hooks and riffs that I’ve personally seen make the unlikeliest of hips wiggle. Every time I listen to them I get excited. And I listen to them a whole lot.
Femme Fatale is the nastier big brother that doesn’t cuddle you afterwards, the side project of Jesse F Keeler who plays and sings every instrument himself. It’s a whole lot nastier, a whole lot more in your face, and a whole lot more incoherent, which makes me love it more.
As I mentioned up top there’s another big reason why this band are so important to me. The cover art to Death From Above’s Album is the silhouette of both members with elephant trunks:
Jesse F Keeler writes in the last blog on the Death From Above website that they were a ‘punk band with pop aspirations’. The artwork symbolises this: they are, in their own words, trying to be ‘the elephants in the room’. They made abrasive punk music but they made it with pop hooks that could bring their music and their message to a large audience.
One of the biggest problems I have with so many ‘underground’ bands is that they are precisely that and never aspire to anything greater, or they seem to feel that aspiring to write music for a large wide audience somehow implies selling out and is a negative thing.
Music and Movies and Art as a whole, for me, are about having something to say and getting that something heard by as many people as possible. Finding a way to incorporate your message or your point into a model in which wide amounts of people can accept it is, for me at least, the most important factor of artistic endeavour. In other words, you can't be an elephant if you’re not in the room, because no ones going to be there to here you storm around.
This is not to say that avant-garde and concept art doesn’t have its place and shouldn’t be allowed to have a niche audience. But for me the art that I would really celebrate is the art that seeks broad influence without sacrificing its original message. This isn’t selling out, it is exactly the philosophy I subscribe to in the creation or art across all mediums. As a musician, and hopefully one day as a Filmmaker I will always seek to be the elephant in the room. That’s the whole point.
Death from Above played their last ever show with Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age, I’m not a huge NIN fan (with the major exception of ‘hurt’) but the thought of Queens of the Stone Age and Death from Above playing together makes me want to give up all of my future plans and devote myself to inventing time travel.
Also if you haven’t followed the frankly trustworthy advice of CSS and made love whilst listening to Death from Above, you haven’t lived.
