E-Mail This Article to a Friend Two’s a charm The dynamic noisemaking duo Death from Above 1979 BY MIKAEL WOOD

"I’m surprised you couldn’t find this in some other interview," Sebastien Grainger remarks. Grainger plays drums and sings in a band from Toronto called Death from Above 1979 who play T.T. the Bear’s Place this Wednesday. I’ve reached him at his band mate Jesse Keeler’s house on a weekday afternoon, and Grainger is wondering why I’ve interrupted their impromptu recording session to ask how the band got together.

He has, it turns out, a point: their story is easily retrievable via Google, and it doesn’t deviate much from the indie-rock standard. As half of a Toronto hardcore band called Femme Fatale, Grainger and Keeler were living together in the house Keeler still calls home. "We were both kind of unemployed," Grainger says; he was "kind of in school and Jesse was kind of between jobs." With all the equipment from Femme Fatale in the house and not a lot of daytime distraction from it, Keeler hatched the idea of forming a band with two bass players. "We started playing together, but considering that we were the only two home, I started playing drums. And instead of playing with two bass players, Jesse just strung two bass amps together, and that sort of ended up sticking as the sound."

In other words, DFA 1979 — the duo tacked on the "1979" when the New York dance-punk production outfit DFA threatened legal action — were born of circumstance, that lifeblood of indie rock ever since Columbus first discovered lo-fi guitar bands killing time inside their huts before the harvest. Yet their music departs from form in much more surprising ways. On You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine (Vice), their full-length debut, Grainger and Keeler build hard-charging monuments to groove, locking into minimal bass-and-drums figures, then riding them toward an intensity that tends to be more rhythmic than melodic. Occasionally, Keeler sticks a shard of keyboard fuzz into the fray; Grainger, for his part, essays a wide range of sneers, wails, and yowls. "Black History Month" and "Sexy Results," both with fine auxiliary percussion work by Grainger, approach the subliminally funky "robot rock" of early Queens of the Stone Age, when that group’s Josh Homme was intent on replicating the endless horizon of the Southern California desert in sound.

You could also compare DFA 1979 with Providence art-punk stars Lightning Bolt, another of the underground’s gathering swell of noise-rock duos. But DFA aren’t as outwardly alienated as Lightning Bolt — they apply extreme volume and ragged timbres toward the same end the original rock-and-rollers did. So their relationship to punk resembles that of wild-haired reality-TV princess Kelly Osbourne, with whom Grainger has been romantically linked of late. I’m a Machine bristles with noise and fury, but like Osbourne’s brat-rock debut, Shut Up, it’s really about having a good time.

"We were confident that Death from Above was more accessible than anything we’d ever done before, that it’s something that would appeal to not just hardcore kids or kids with certain haircuts or whatever," Grainger says of the difference between what he and Keeler had done in Femme Fatale and what they do now. "We knew it would appeal to a bunch of different people. It’s not complicated — it’s riff-driven rock music that is played at a danceable pace, you know? It’s steady, and I’m singing about things that most people can relate to."

Yet the lyrics represent another left turn in DFA’s arsenal. Grainger spews his fair share of tone-poem art-rock nonsense, but he also rubs the band’s resolute grind against disarmingly sensitive dispatches from an unexpectedly hungry heart. "Come here baby, I love your company," he sings in "Romantic Rights." "We could do it and start a family." In "Little Girl," he even looks forward to becoming an uncle: "My brother has a lady, and one day she will have a baby."

"It’s not really conscious," Grainger says when I mention those lyrics. "I was thinking about it today because we’ve recently been asked a lot about the weird polarity of the music and the lyrics. What I’m doing lyrically is trying to write words that fit the cadence of the songs and fit the rhythm of the songs; I’m not going out of my way to write about specific things that contrast with the music. I’m trying to write lyrics that I won’t regret singing in six months or a year or two years."

Death from Above 1979 perform this Wednesday, January 26, at T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline Street in Central Square, with Read Yellow and Clickers; call (617) 492-BEAR.