On The Fool, the youthful vocals of Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman occasionally blend while stirring up the eras of Stevie Nicks, Luscious Jackson, and Siouxie Sioux (credited as a guest mixer). (Not to figure out, as the band suggests below, the light from a joint.) It builds on the promise of Exquisite Corpse, their acclaimed 2008 EP mastered by John Frusciante, but is separated by a thematic and sonic darkness, a spectrum of wild emotion traversed with the lights off. The album, entitled The Fool, out October 25, is Warpaint’s first release since signing with Rough Trade last year. A collision of intimacy and power, the renditions of cuts off their debut album swirled through the proverbial art-school rafters into the grip of a mature and entrancing artistry. Earlier this month, when Warpaint opened for The xx at Washington Heights’ United Palace, an underused venue of dizzying gilded ceilings and eerie red church light, it proved the perfect setting to experience them in concert. The live performances by the group are consistently impressive. The music made by these four L.A.-based females is indicative of a West Coast “vibe”-or, if you will, a California spirit animal that ingested a dream pill. When the cursor moves across the board of recent press for Warpaint, it spells out the following. PHOTO COURTESY OF BEGGARS GROUP/MIA KIRBY. But the band pushed harder on its encores, particularly “No Way Out,” which starts like a ballad and gathers heft and speed until the women brandish desperation as pride: “I can’t find my way,” the chorus proclaims.Įarlier, in “Undertow” - another seething song about infidelity and passion - the women sang, “Now I’ve got you in the undertow.” When Warpaint’s hypnosis took hold, the undertow was the band’s home turf.WARPAINT IS (L-R): EMILY KOKAL, JENNY LEE LINDBERG, STELLA MOZGAWA, AND THERESA WAYMAN. It depends on listeners to be swept into each song as it evolves - and, at times, its songs unfolded a little too deliberately, especially because Warpaint didn’t always match the precision of its recordings onstage. Warpaint doesn’t usually construct its songs with the immediate payoffs of verses breaking into choruses. (That’s the problem with a free concert audience that mixes fans and the merely curious.) “I could drive, drive myself crazy, but this time I want to listen,” goes “Drive” from “Warpaint” (Rough Trade), a song that very gradually built from a slow electronic blip to an ever-thickening tangle of guitars and vocal harmonies, moving from self-questioning to euphoria, although Warpaint didn’t get the singalong it wanted on the song’s final, wordless chant. Its lyrics are not narratives but, instead, bulletins about immediate reactions. Warpaint sings about rapture and anger, trust and betrayal. Songs often start out serene and airy, only to vent, sooner or later, the disorder and agitation within. There’s more gridwork in the vocals all four band members sing, offering permutations of solos, harmonies and counterpoint. Like the postpunk bands, Warpaint often constructs its patterns with reggae-style bass lines, funk backbeats and terse, floating guitar phrases, all clockwork and clarity, even when Warpaint builds in unexpected shifts of meter or texture - as it did in the happily asymmetrical “Keep It Healthy,” which opened both the concert and the self-titled album that Warpaint released in January. Bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order and the Cure often dug into one chord with circling, inexorable riffs, building tension within stasis the singers would offer steady chants or get themselves worked up. In some ways, Warpaint harks back to the late 1970s and early ’80s, when postpunk rock and Minimalism shared a mutual fascination. “How can I keep my composure?” the band members sang, but the word “composure” sometimes swooped up toward a scream. Warpaint, the four-woman Los Angeles band that headlined Celebrate Brooklyn! on Thursday night, places its songs at that complicated intersection: where a grid of repetition meets the amorphous crosscurrents of emotion and desire. But they can all be hypnotic, compelling, even obsessive. Feelings and relationships - well, they aren’t. Musical patterns are neat, stable, definite, predictable.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |