Death From Above 1979
Outrage! Is Now

I've never liked going to the beach. And I've always hated camping.

So imagine how in love I must have been when, at just twenty years old, I said yes to that redhead girl. She wanted to spend a week camping by the sea and I told her it was fine, I even promised her that my parents would let me borrow the car. I really must have been in love. At the time, I was obsessed with You're a Woman, I'm a Machine by Death from Above 1979 and everything seemed more beautiful, more pure, more hopeful. Okay, it's not that I was in love. Actually: that girl only watched Law & Order, talked only about trivialities like "they said at graduation they're going to have an external scientific commissioner oh help", and when she wrote it was in a hypotactic style as abominable as it was unaware. Worst of all: she couldn't stand jokes about death and had two other flings, mostly with a generic jerk and a bipolar metal head. So imagine how cute she must have been to imprint herself so easily in my twenty-year-old mind and penetrate so violently into my most lustful post-adolescent thoughts.

A few days later, she told me that it was no longer the case for us to see each other. Why? I never understood, but I accepted her decision. I never understood why simply because even in the text messages you couldn’t make sense of a damn thing she wrote. I swear. Anyway, I understood perfectly that there was no reason, she was just tired of me and that was it. I made peace with it immediately and two weeks later I was already trying to hook up with a silly brunette I had met in the spring. I spent the next two weeks dodging the tongue of her unattractive friend.

Even for the ten years of silence between You're a Woman, I'm a Machine (2004) and The Physical World (2014) there must not have been any real reason. Then The Physical World wasn't as good as its predecessor: it was nice, but without that inventiveness, without that chaos that made the debut LP by DfA1979 glorious (and the Heads Up EP majestic). Fortunately, in the meantime, I had found a serious girlfriend who comforted me, and still comforts me, every time I encounter unconvincing music releases. Recently, Outrage! Is Now, the third album by Death from Above, was released. It's a good record, the bass and drums pair creates a proper racket, our duo churns out some good songs without too much self-referencing, the urge to play the album again is there. Statues and Holy Books really hit hard, Moonlight is what Muse would sound like if Muse were good and not terrible, Freeze Me even has a pointless piano at the beginning (but how cute), Never Swim Alone has a line that reminds me of the Underworld theme from Super Mario Bros. Of course, it's not You're a Woman, I'm a Machine: those moments will never come back. Just as my friend with the peachy bottom will never return. But age has taught me the wisdom that I didn't truly love her, whereas Death from Above I really loved and still do.

One thing I've never understood, however, is this: the jerk and the bipolar metal head were much more handsome and rich than me, so why did she hang onto a loser like me in her little bird park? A part of me likes to think that the truth lies in the title of Death from Above's first album. But more likely, it was because I was the only one of her boyfriends who could simultaneously use the subjunctive and not show up to dates listening to Wolves in the Throne Room.