By Rob Duguay

This year marks You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine’s 20th anniversary and, in homage, Death From Above 1979 has slowly but surely been releasing re-recorded tracks from the disc over the past few months.

When Toronto dance punk duo Death From Above 1979 released their debut album You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine back in 2004, the duo of drummer & vocalist Sebastien Grainger and bassist Jesse F. Keeler turned the indie world on its head. Yeah, The White Stripes and The Black Keys had the rock duo thing down, but they accomplished it using guitars. This duo crafted an emphatic sound — chock full of electricity —  that left bass players yearning to capture Keeler’s fuzzy and distorted tone and a lot of drummers wowed by Grainger’s technique. This year marks the disc’s 20th anniversary and, in homage, the band has slowly but surely been releasing re-recorded tracks from the disc over the past few months. On tour in support of this revision, Death From Above 1979 will be performing at The Sinclair in Cambridge on September 30 with Washington D.C. punks Teen Mortgage the opening act. The show kicks off at 8 p.m.

Grainger and I chatted ahead of the show about how the re-recording of the band’s rookie effort came about.We also kicked around some realities about the music industry, went into the reason for the elephant noses, and wanting to move forward to something new sooner rather than later.

The Arts Fuse: What was the initial catalyst for wanting to re-record You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine? Why not a deluxe reissue or something in that mode? Was the decision well considered or was it more of a spur of the moment type of thing?

Sebastien Grainger: We approached it from a couple different angles. The first one was that, even though it’s considered a cult classic record, it’s still our work and we regretted certain ways in which we had produced it back in the day. It’s not that we thought we could improve it because it’s a classic, but we wanted to explore what it would sound like if we made it today. Our favorite sounds on subsequent records were discovered when we recorded for a few days in a big, old, classic studio with big room drums. That is what happened when we made 2014’s The Physical World with Dave Sardy. We finished the record in his home studio where the drum room is very small and we discovered our favorite sound.

Then, when we recorded with Eric Valentine, it was a similar thing. It was a big room that we recorded some drums in and when we took the drums into the small room we found what we liked. The punchy, transient, direct, and more impactful sound of  he drum  is what I prefer as a drummer. I prefer playing drums in those smaller rooms when we’re recording. When we made Is 4 Lovers, it was a similar situation with us recording in a small room. We wanted to make a smaller room version of You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine. It was a way to honor the 20th anniversary. I don’t know if anyone has done that before, I certainly don’t have any records in my collection that are like that. We just wanted to make another cool version of the album. There’s another component; the original record has been absorbed into the machine of the music industry so we don’t retain the master rights to it. I don’t know if we ever will.

AF: That stinks.

Grainger: Yeah, there’s an aspect to the re-recording that reflects that situation. We’d like to have something that we can press whenever we want and sell whenever we want.

AF: I totally understand why you’d like to have that opportunity. Along with it being Death From Above 1979’s first full-length album, You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine also presented the debut of the band’s current logo, with you and Jesse both drawn with elephant noses. This was after your Heads Up EP featured the same image, though the design was different. How did the logo originally come about and is there any symbolism or meaning behind the elephant noses?

Death From Above 1979’s drummer & vocalist Sebastien Grainger (l) and bassist Jesse F. Keeler (r). Photo: Eva Michon

Grainger: It’s a little bit multilayered. I was really into Deep Purple’s In Rock record at the time and the cover is them with the four members as Mount Rushmore. It’s an impressionistic visual of the band and at the time it wasn’t cool to put your face on a record, it wasn’t cool to be poster guys. Record covers were kind of obscure or artsy or designy– it wasn’t cool to put your face on a record. I thought we should do that. Jesse had made a couple of record covers for his band Black Cat #13 that were similar in their use of reductionist, minimalist drawing of the faces. He was like, “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

When he was designing the cover — I’m pretty sure it was subconscious — Jesse was inspired by a religious image. He is half Indian and his grandfather had bought him a little ceramic elephant when he was a boy. It was a terrible toy for a child because a kid is gonna break it, he or she can’t really play with it. So from when he was a child and then into adulthood that ceramic elephant sat on his shelf. As he got older he became kind of obsessed with elephant images — it’s a deity in India. Jesse collected pictures of elephants in his home. Little statues, paintings, those kinds of things. So the idea of a deified elephant or an elephant trunk was on his mind, and he drew on that, perhaps subconsciously, to try to obscure our faces in that way. It was a kind of natural thing.

I feel very grateful that Jesse had that clarity of mind; he was kind of in tune with what makes a cool band like the Ramones, Misfits, bands like that who have classic logos on t-shirts that people wear, even if they’re not into the group. How many Nirvana t-shirts do you see on 10 year-old kids these days? You have to go for perfection.

AF: I couldn’t agree more. In terms of the re-recorded debut, three songs on the album are currently out: “Going Steady”, “Romantic Rights”, and “Turn It Out”. Is the plan to release all the songs on the album first as singles before completing the entire album?

Grainger: Like a lot of our band’s projects, it starts with an idea that sometimes becomes too complicated to pull off in the way we planned. The original plan was to release one song a month throughout the year until it reached 11 months and then we would release the record during the last month. The problem with that approach is that it spread the tracks out in a really weird way. Trying to hit a mark of releasing a song every month — particularly given that we were doing other work in real time — was incredibly time consuming, especially for me, as the producer and engineer of it. We put a pause on that set-up and decided to re-record the album in batches. We’ll probably put out another single or two and then we’ll release the full record.

AF: You guys have a show coming up at The Sinclair. Afterwards, what can we expect from Death From Above 1979 going into next year? Are there any plans for a new record?

Grainger: We’re going to wrap this tour up early in the year. We had a third leg of concerts that was supposed to happen in December, but we pushed it for personal reasons after January. After that, I never want to review our work ever again, to be honest. (Laughs) I want to move forward. It was nice to honor the 20th anniversary of our first record. In the future there might be more attempts for us to redo past work, but I don’t want to be the instigator of them. If we’re going to be celebrated, it would be nice if someone else did it. And if nobody wants to do it, then let it not happen at all. Re-recording our earlier work was an experiment in nostalgia and I’m not inclined to repeat it. As soon as this recording project is wrapped up, the disc released, and the shows are over, the band will be onto new stuff for sure.

Rob Duguay is an arts & entertainment journalist based in Providence, who is originally from Shelton, CT. Outside of the Arts Fuse, he has also written for DigBoston, Aquarian Weekly, Providence Journal, Newport Daily News, Worcester Magazine, New Noise Magazine, Manchester Ink Link, and numerous other publications. While covering mostly music, he has also written about film, TV, comedy, theater, visual art, food, drink, sports, and cannabis.