It’s always difficult to establish a solo career in the shadow of your previous band if it was short-lived, intensely loved and went out in peak form. But over the past decade, Sebastian Grainger’s had it easier than most in that unenviable position. As the drummer/vocalist in Death From Above 1979, he basically did one thing—searing, noise-pop breakup songs where he and bassist Jessie F. Keller punished their instruments as hard as they punished themselves in the lyrics. And DFA 1979’s last album You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine nailed an extremely specific sound and feeling so perfectly that a reunion show where a police horse got punched seems like the only logical or acceptable follow-up. You couldn’t begrudge the lack of new material, as their limited range and narrow focus led you to believe that it would never top You’re a Woman, and in all likelihood, should be a lot worse. Unlike the more “singer-songwriter” excursion of 2008’s Sebastien Grainger & The Mountains, the slicker, louder Yours to Discover gives you an idea of just how much worse.
By a good distance the best song here, “Waking Up Dead”, is the closest Grainger gets to recalling his old band in both content and delivery. Feeling like shit about a busted relationship and knowing you deserve to feel that way was basically You’re a Woman’s emotional baseline and despite its zippy, glossy latter-day Strokes facade, “Waking Up Dead” is a domestic drama given a gut-level punch. After another night of getting wasted and forgetting anything he might’ve said, Grainger yelps “I woke up in an empty bed/ you left for work/ I thought you left for good”, and yeah, we’ve all been there. The chorus also boasts an immediate hook, albeit one that starts out strong for its first couple of bars before taking too many indecisive turns. Still, “Waking Up Dead” is the peak of Yours to Discover and the last time it ever bears some resemblance of a relatable human moment. It’s also the second song, and the first is an instrumental “Overture.”
This is problematic since Yours to Discover is an album of presumable love songs. Not only that, there’s more than a few lovemaking songs, which in a roundabout way has the album picking up where DFA 1979 left off. It’s just an alternate reality where “Sexy Results” turns out like Sugar Ray’s “Fly”, a jumping off point rather than the previous album’s total outlier of a closer. Sure, many people love “Sexy Results” (myself included) and DFA 1979 might still be living off some of that Motorola Q money, but it benefitted greatly from humor (in both the lyrical construct and Simpsons reference) and context within a caustic, self-flagellating record. Yours to Discover has neither qualities aside from a few casual remarks about becoming a greying letch. And as such, all that remains is the smooth talk and the smoother corporate rock sheen. For the latter, don’t think of Toto, but rather latter day Weezer and Fountains of Wayne, assembly line pop-rock incapable of inspiring any emotion except for the nagging sense you’re being sold something.
In this event, it’s non-descript civic planning over lukewarm funk on “The Streets Are Still a Mess”, demo-quality disco more akin to the other DFA (“Let’s Move To NYC”) or, most often, Grainger himself (“I Want Sebastien Grainger”). Grainger’s usually selling himself in the figurative sense, as a power-pop craftsman, and some of these songs are actually pretty catchy. But they stick for the wrong reasons, whether it’s an awkward melodic turn or, more often, an unconscionably lazy lyric. Over a dorm-room acoustic strum, “I'm Looking For A Hand” oozes fake strings and even faker sentiments—“How many times have I gone missin’/ looking for a girl in a world of women/ I tell it to you, ma-ha-ha-an/ I’m looking for a ha-ah-ah-and.”
Yours to Discover never feels like a dishonest record, just one where it’s incredibly hard to grasp the intentions or ambitions of its creator. Are we to take the title, cover and solo attribution of Yours to Discover as a sign that it's meant to be heard as a transmission from Sebastien Grainger rather than "Sebastien Grainger's new project"? Or, does the plasticine production and rigid verse-chorus structure of these songs give you a sense that Grainger hears it as a star turn of sorts, albeit in an aesthetic that has no currency whatsoever? The bigger issue and really the only one, is that for an album so obsessed with physicality, none of its twelve songs operates from the brain, heart or groin. So while Grainger didn’t make a record that tops You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, he did make one more deserving of its title.
