Concert Review: Death From Above 1979

David Amirdjanian
December 12, 2017

I’ve been listening to death from above for a while now, and when I saw that they announced their tour and that they were coming to St. Louis, I was incredibly excited. The tickets were surprisingly cheap and was incredibly delighted by that.
This was my first time at the Delmar Hall and I actually enjoyed it more than The Pageant. The bar was in the back, and wasn’t connected to the concert hall, so the place wasn’t sectioned off specifically for minors, it made the place feel a lot more open and a whole lot more personal. As soon as I got there at 7:40, 20 minutes before the openers came out. I made my way to the pit as close as I could get myself to the stage.
The Beaches were the opener that night, and they were incredibly charming. It was a Canadian girl band that played for about an hour. I haven’t heard of them until that night, but I was pleasantly surprised by their aggression at times. Lead by singer and bassist Jordan Miller, they absolutely rocked the stage the entire time. They reminded me a whole lot of a crossover of bands “Bass Drum of Death” and “Band of Skulls”.
As they finished, the curtain fell behind them, revealing the logo for DFA. As they exited the stage and moved their equipment out, the new equipment started to be moved in. The sound guy was messing with Jesse Keeler’s bass and it’s distortion for a solid 20-30 minutes. It felt like an eternity. Something just wasn’t right and they kept adjusting with it, and he kept bringing the guitar to the massive speakers behind him and allowing the guitar to release massive amounts of ear piercing feedback from the speakers. He just kept doing it, over, and over, while we were just there staring at him and waiting for DFA to take the stage. The wait definitely killed the mood that was set with the previous band. It turned out that one of the distortion pedals died as it was being transported, but it magically fixed itself later in the concert.
Around 9:30, they finally took the stage opening with their lead single “Freeze Me” off of their new album “Outrage Is Now!” It absolutely blew me away from start to finish. Sebastien Grainger, the singer/drummer of DFA is just as good live as he is in the studio.
Freeze that for a second, I want to talk about the experience and everything that happened around me throughout the concert. Ever since The Beaches finished and we were waiting for DFA to take the stage, the people behind me looked like they were about to mosh their hearts out. There was some dude who looked like he was straight out of the 70’s with a orange collar crew-neck Hamlet t-shirt. He was incredibly skinny, but he had a slight gut. He had super long hair, and looked like he blasted Lynyrd Skynyrd and Van Halen on a daily basis. There was another guy that looked like a Slavic gangster, with short blond hair and he was also wearing a Deafheaven shirt.
These guys were the perpetrators of a violent moshpit. They started to mosh the moment DFA started to play. A huge square separated in between the audience and the moshers. I was unfortunately at the border of the pit, and they kept running into me, and every time they did, I was lifted off of my feet, flying into the people behind me. Honestly, it was pretty awesome, even though it got obnoxious at times.
Death From Above ended the concert and Sebastien turned around and threw his drumsticks into the crowd, and somehow, by some random luck, I actually caught it, and I couldn’t be any happier that night. Not only did I see one of my favorite bands, I also got a memento from it. Hands down it the most energetic and interesting concert I’ve seen, minus the 30 minute delay due to technical difficulties.