How to alienate people and find success in a local music scene.
Last week, The Grid’s Lara Zarum awarded the latest album by Toronto-via-Halifax folk mystics Tasseomancy a rather punitive 3/10 score and subsequently triggered a minor shitstorm on our website. Beyond the outrage over a reviewer assigning such a low rating to a group that has generated significant goodwill among its Canadian indie-pop peers, several of the angry comments posted in response to the review charged Lara with another, more serious offence: that she had somehow failed in her professional obligation to support her local independent music scene.
It’s entirely valid—and healthy—for readers to vocally object to a review. But to suggest that a critic owes it to her community to always review local bands positively is presumptuous and naïve, to say the least. (With all due respect to the band, last we checked, none of our writers were paid employees of Tasseomancy Corp.) Still, it’s an understandable reaction coming from a tight-knit scene like Toronto’s, where the symbiotic relationship between artists and the local media often blurs the line between criticism and advocacy. And this is true nationwide: when we speak of Canadian indie-rock’s greatest triumphs in the past decade, the word “community” inevitably comes up, whether it’s in reference to supergroups like Broken Social Scene and The New Pornographers catapulting their satellite affiliates to greater success, or the Arcade Fire redirecting the spotlight onto musical mates in the Montreal-scene. Given the formidable geographic and financial barriers faced by fledgling Canadian bands, it’s historically taken a big, community-wide effort—on the part of the artists, their cottage-industry labels, promoters and press—to break through on an international scale.
That makes the story of Death From Above 1979 all the more peculiar. When the duo of Jesse Keeler and Sebastien Grainger first emerged in 2002, their brutalizing yet oddly danceable fuzz-metal was the antithesis of the lushly rendered, orchestral rock peddled by the leading Toronto indie acts of the time. What’s more, they lived in the east end (egad!) and didn’t seem especially eager to make friends in the west. They released their debut EP on a small Vancouver indie label, and their first major media attention came not from the local weeklies, but American websites like Buddyhead. Their provocative lyrics about cocaine sluts and dead wombs had some pegging them as macho misogynists. And for a while there, around ’03/’04, it seemed like DFA79 only deigned to play locally when visiting alt-rock royalty like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars handpicked them for an opening slot.
Where the likes of Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire projected an intense sincerity that suggested playing music was a life-or-death proposition for them, Keeler and Grainger seemed to regard DFA79 as merely a short-term strategic vehicle to get to somewhere else. One year after issuing their first and only full-length album, 2004’s You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine—which was released internationally by Vice/679 and served as a springboard to a 2005 arena tour with Nine Inch Nails—the duo called it quits. Keeler went on to form the popular electro-house DJ/production team MSTRKRFT and Grainger opened up a recording studio to facilitate his own solo career.
But when DFA79 suddenly re-emerged this past spring for high-profile shows at the South by Southwest and Coachella festivals, it started to seem like the layoff was all part of some grand master plan. Previously, the band’s biggest local headlining appearance was a three-night, four-show stand at the 400-capacity Horseshoe Tavern. This week, the band will play two sold-out shows (Oct. 27 and 28) at the 2,500-capacity Sound Academy. Theirs is as much a victory of economic theory as art: By cutting off their supply in 2005, just as their demand was peaking, DFA79 made themselves a scarce commodity before shrewdly reintroducing themselves into a marketplace where the 20-year cycle for nostalgic revivals has accelerated to something closer to five. As a result, they’ve effectively tripled their audience by basically doing nothing.
But even if the Death from Above 1979 saga lacks the romance and feel-good qualities often applied to our country’s other celebrated musical exports, it’s a crucial part of the evolving Canadian indie-rock narrative. DFA79’s renegade crusade ultimately proved that an underground band from Toronto didn’t need an army to win the battle against the odds—and they showed subsequent Toronto-scene outcasts like Crystal Castles and Fucked Up that you can take unapologetically loud and abrasive music to international audiences without first gaining the approval of your hometown media and peers. Even when your local music scene doesn’t support you, there are ways to surpass it.
