Desperately trying to scratch an itch you just can’t fucking get at: Ten years later, that’s still the overwhelming sensation that permeates You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, the 2004 debut by Toronto’s Death From Above 1979. That lack of intimate connection and tactile resolution is echoed in the failed interface hinted at in the album’s title. DFA 1979 just couldn’t get no satisfaction—and when the band blew up in the mid '00s, they promptly imploded, only adding to that nagging tingle. Here was a duo gathering the shrapnel of so many scenes that exploded earlier in the decade—garage rock, stoner metal, dance punk—squeezing them into a tightly wound mass of fuzz and force, only to let it all slip through their fingers.
DFA 1979’s two halves, vocalist/drummer Sebastien Grainger and bassist/keyboardist Jesse F. Keeler, parted ways in 2006. Grainger kept sporadically busy as a singer/songwriter; Keeler moved his electro-slanted side-project MSTRKRFT to the front burner. Now, after an initial onstage reunion in 2011 that marked the mending of broken fences, they’ve delivered The Physical World. So much has changed since You’re a Woman, and so little, too: Julian Casablancas, Karen O, and Interpol are still around, and coincidentally, each of them has even made noise this very week. (It’s enough to make you wonder if they all secretly synced up with each other to enhance their retro-'00s brand synergy.) But it’s been a decade since Grainger and Keeler showed up to that particular party with 12-packs in hand, and they were a little late, arriving just as it was beginning to simmer down. Granted, they helped send it off with a bang; a last spurt of debauchery before everyone either hooks up or passes out, You’re a Woman raged like there was no tomorrow.
The Physical World—wiser and more wary than its predecessor—is that tomorrow, the one that was never supposed to come. It doesn't so much sound like You’re a Woman was 10 years ago as it does 10 months: “It’s the same old song, just a different tune,” Grainger rasps on “Right On, Frankenstein!”, an efficient yet spirited dance-punk procedural that wouldn’t have sounded out of place amid You’re a Woman rockers like “Turn It Out” and “Cold War”. The Physical World is built out of pieces of the band’s own past, but it hangs together beautifully, all sleek musculature and acrobatic riffs. There’s not as much scraping, lunging, or dive-bombing on the album as compared to You’re a Woman, although that doesn’t keep The Physical World’s title track from glitching and spazzing in a fugue of pseudo-metallic collapse: “Go bridge won/ Has strung out/ Build up/ Tear it down,” Grainger wails, resembling a cyborg caught in a robotic purgatory. “Oh no, not again/ I get the feeling this is never gonna end.” The song dissolves in a haze of wheezing keyboard, like some creaking, rickety, steampunk version of itself.
Solipsism and self-recycling aside, Grainger branches out into new territory, at least for DFA 1979: a conceptual arc, if not a narratively coherent one. "Virgins" and "White Is Red" hinge together like a great, two-part TV episode, full of lurid melodrama and teen-angst iconography; summer school, skating in pools, and innocence left in the backseat of a car all pop up in "Virgins", which pounds and writhes with Ted Nugent-meets-Josh Homme swagger. And while the similarly highway-themed "White Is Red" seems like a sequel of sorts—"Frankie was a heartbreaker, I didn’t know it at the start/ She was only 16 when she went and broke my heart," Grainger croons with all the grit of a natural-born balladeer, or at least Brandon Flowers with a better grasp of the Boss— it doesn’t overtax the link. These are loose associations, motifs that float around and occasionally complete each other, the type of subtlety that the Grainger of You’re a Woman wasn’t concerned with. Balling and brooding were his two settings, and he toggled them frantically, never seeming to find what he was looking for, so he's clearly spent the last 10 years doing some growing up.
In a recent interview Keeler did for Stereogum, he talks about his and Grainger's metamorphosis from hormone-pumping post-adolescents to grownups with families and, of all the crazy things, lives. “Back then we didn’t have any kind of life outside of the band,” he says, speaking of the DFA 1979's pre-breakup years. “The band was everything; it was literally all we had. Now we both have lives of our own outside of the music we make together. And that’s really important. Everyone needs to have a life.” Calling The Physical World a work of maturity would be selling the album, and maturity, short: “Cheap Talk” and “Government Trash” zoom like rockets and stomp like dinosaurs, full of snotty, boyish abandon, while “Trainwreck 1979” dabbles in mirror-gazing and mythologizing. The album is, above all, pragmatic—a more judicious application of the band’s mixed-use energy—but it doesn’t do so at the expense of soul.
The Physical World’s most gripping song, “Always On”, paints a dystopian scenario drawn from DFA 1979’s own experience as the objects of expectation as well as the downward spiral of music-industry boom-and-bust. Grainger sneers, “If we brought Kurt back to life/ There’s no way he would survive,” and he’s not only talking about the vicissitudes of the pop world that Kurt Cobain loved and hated, but also of the social-media membrane we’ve all become cocooned in. “Show me something new/ Something I can like,” he begs in singsong horror as he hops across a bed of sharpened hooks, unable to reconcile, consummate, or otherwise bridge the schism between what exists online and what can only be touched by skin. With The Physical World, Grainger and Keeler haven’t entirely scratched the itch they instigated a decade ago. But they’ve learned to live with the burn, and that’s the next best thing.
