HOLD ON CHILDREN

I'm back from the dead - at least until I leave the country on Sunday.



The latest single (in the UK) from Death From Above 1979's Your A Woman, I'm A Machine is the album's "ballad", "Black History Month". The token slow song for DFA1979, of course, means droning, heavy-as-shit bass guitar, sizzling drum build-ups, and Sebastien Gainger's wailing like a dying metal-head cat, which adds up to one of the most appealing songs on the album.

The video for the song is notable for keeping a straight face for its entirety. Instead of coming up with an inane story line like so many of today's music videos, it takes the "ballad" tag to heart and features the duo playing the song on dueling pianos in a seedy Las Vegas lounge (there's no piano in the song, mind you). The funniest part of the video is that I would bet that the twosome aim to some day be playing music in a similar situation in their later years (them kids be crazy).

The b-side to the single is a cover of everybody's favorite new Brits, Bloc Party. The band somewhat unsurpsingly chose to redo the pumping, visceral "Luno", which you can stream at their MySpace site. Characteristically, DFA1979 pulls the bass line out from the depths of the original and turn it into a pulsating keyboard riff from which the rest of the song springs from. Ethereal guitars lines are replaced by bass feed back and sinister keyboard squelches, while Grainger does his best Kele impersonation for the vocals, and instead of coming off as trite, his seem more urgent, and a bit evil. The incendiary cover illuminates the original in a different light (which is what any good cover should do) and gives it a new vitality.

The song makes me wish a greater amount of current bands would plan more detailed interactions with each other. Artists acknowledging and getting inspired from other artists' work gives the work a greater feeling of importance. Things like The Strokes and White Stripes shows in Detroit/NYC, the Flaming Lips covering the White Stripes (or writing songs about them), or the new !!! single (more on that later), in turn, feel really exciting.