SEBASTIEN GRAINGER

YOURS TO DISCOVER (Last Gang Records)

9/20

Like other icons of the early noughties scene who have reformed in recent years (At The Drive-In, The Libertines) Death From Above 1979’s reunion in 2011 was a short-lived blast of barely congealed nostalgia which has otherwise proved fruitless. Despite the promise of new music, it’s been over two years since Jesse F. Keeler and Sebastien Grainger once again began thrashing out choice cuts from DFA79’s sole full-length, 2005’s You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine. Instead of a new album, eight years on from that glorious dance-punk maelstrom we have Grainger’s solo LP Yours To Discover, the first to be released purely under his own name.

After a short (and skippable) instrumental introduction, the power pop of Waking Up Dead more accurately sets the scene, full of rising and falling riffs, jabs of synth and a ‘big chorus’. This chunk of sugary rock sounds like it should have been released five years ago, and it’s perhaps a cruel irony that in a year awash with the sounds of the 80s and 90s, it feels so out of time. Things get even more cloying on the record’s first single, Going With You, when Grainger sings over a minimalist composition of synth, bass and drums of “forgetting your number and never listening to our favourite song” before proclaiming “I’ll go with you anywhere, New York City, California, I’m the one that’s going with you”, which is a lesson in triteness if ever there was one. Is this really the same guy who once expertly used the word ‘dilettante’ in a lyric? And so the theme of bland danceability continues with the Jacko pastiche Your Body Works and the plodding Second Of Love. There are moments of enjoyment, such as the infectious chorus of The Streets Are Still A Mess and the pulsating I Don’t Believe In Ghosts, but without the spikey riffs and punk snarl that made Death From Above such an exciting prospect, Yours To Discover is largely an exercise in sterility.

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Words: Andrew Broaks