Drums Are For Parades.
Or so they say…we’re not sure that when the name was coined it was meant to be literal. In fact, truth be told, we don’t even know where the name came from. Because like nearly everything else about DAFP – the answers to any questions just seem to lead to more questions…
What we do know to be fact. There are three of them. Sometimes four. The fourth “member” isn’t a member, but another drummer. We know they were formed in Gent, Belgium sometime between 2006 and 2007. They recorded both their albums with one Niek Meul, himself from Gent music royalty. We know that somewhere deep in the anals of their history, one member was once once a member of Soulwax. We know this record is their second. And there the trail gets – well, blurry…
Shall we talk about the music? Or the live show. I’ll do the live show first – my introduction to it was above a sports Arena in Antwerp. I’d heard the sonic mayhem of their first album, and was as curious as anyone else to see it with my own two eyes. As the three of them shuffled onstage and plugged in, I was immediately transported back to seeing the Melvins circa 1998. There was a lineage that went beyond the imposing Buzz-like figure of Wim R. DAFP’s guitarist, occasional singer, and nominal “front man”. As they turned their backs on us, and laid into a track off their debut album, all hell broke loose around me. I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was the songs, or the sheer maelstrom of movement and music coming from the stage, but the audience bit down hard like a rabid pit bull and didn’t let go…twenty minutes later, it was done. Ears ringing, I walked backstage to congratulate the band. 2 hours later I was watching drummer Piet pull shards of broken glass from his skull whilst waiting for an ambulance to turn up. That, as the cliché goes, was just typical of this particular group of atypical personalities…
So to the album you’re probably already listening to. ‘Master’. The title alone alludes to an audacity which imbues everything DAFP do. It’s a whirlwind of razor sharp mutant sonic butterflies, with nods to everyone from Masters of Reality, to early Soundgarden, to Mike Patton’s post-FNM work in Fantomas and Tomahawk. As I listened to the album for the first time I couldn’t help but recall an incident 12 months earlier backstage in a field somewhere in Belgium. Watching Chris Goss bear hugging drummer Piet then berating the assorted Foo Fighters and Crooked Vultures around him that DAFP were the “heaviest band in all of Belgium”. To be quite honest, I think rather than a Master Of Reality, in that moment he was a master of the understatement…
My Drums Are For Parades Story, and a brief biography - Ahsan Naeem, 2010.
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