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Death From Above 1979 "You're A Woman, I'm A Machine" by Blake Cooper A funny thing happens about halfway through listening to You're A Woman, I'm A Machine... you forget what

you're listening to.

I mean, you can still hear the music, but something's different. It's...changed, somehow. It no longer just sounds like two guys using a bass guitar and a drum set to make music. It sounds like something too big to be so minimal.

Thus is the brilliance of Death From Above 1979. Just when people were starting to get sick of the minimalist two person rock combos (thanks mostly to the White Stripes), this band comes out of nowhere (well, Canada, to be more exact) and reinvents a sound you could have sworn to God had been completely exhausted.

You're a Woman, clocking in at around thirty five minutes, is a whiplash inducing tour of no-filler rock anthems that just might make you groove uncontrollably. The trick is in the rhythm section (which pretty much means the entire band). The bass guitar doesn't sound like a bass guitar at all, but instead is bathed in fuzz and passed off as an electric guitar, with pretty good results. Together with the drums they weave a pretty funky backdrop, along with the occasional organ sample, for the vocals, which are actually unbelieavably soulful and heartfelt. And it's loudest, it approaches post-hardcore levels of hysteria. And it's quiestest, well... it's still pretty damn loud.

It will break down like this: upon the first listen the music will blend into the background. It makes pretty good driving music. But on repeated listens, it starts to stand out as more than just an accompaniment. It can't help but push it's way to the foreground. It feels frighteningly close to human.

Playboy called it one of the best albums of 2004, and while it deserves all the buzz it can get I'm not sure I would go that far. There's a lot more innovative stuff going on, but that's the beauty of it: it doesn't matter. This isn't the kind of music that needs to be innovative to work, because it's fun. And most of the time, that's more important anyway.

Our ratings are done on a ten-point scale, and we consider ourselves fairly conservative with our ratings. Five is average, the six to seven range is good, and anything above that is damn near legendary.

Copyright (C) 2005 Quadraphonic.