Warpaint - The Fool
- Written by Mitchell Stirling
For those of us that heard Warpaint’s sparse and chilling take on Bowie’s ‘Ashes To Ashes’ earlier this year as well as their EP in late 2009, it can come as no surprise that their debut proper has surfaced fully formed through the veneer and fug of LA chronic that dominates the stoned, hazy outlook of contemporaries Wavves and Best Coast. While those bands’ music exudes a summery naivety, Warpaint come from a colder, darker place. It’s not gothic though, it feels like they are as dark as say New Order were in 1982/3, on the way from being Joy Division but not quite arrived at the band they would be c. Low-Life and beyond.
Warpaint’s Exquisite Corpse EP was released five years after the band was formed, the songs had been gestating for a couple of years at least as the band found their feet. With such a long build up to The Fool the stylistic traits and quirks that are found on this record seem deeply imbedded and are executed without fuss or a great deal of showiness. On the opener, which was curiously mooted as the closer at one point, ‘Set Your Arms Down’ there’s a moment where Stella Mozgawa’s drums change up a gear and for a brief moment touch the metronomic motorik of Krautrock. The song though doesn’t make a big deal out of this - it doesn’t pivot on this in a way that say Radiohead’s ‘Bodysnatchers’ does about two and a half minutes in where the whole song bends around the change in tempo. Here, it’s threatened but never followed through.
On ‘Bees’ the drum sound is very reminiscent of the dubstep influenced sound on The XX’s debut and the band similarly find a lot of traction in pulling out one of the components of the song and letting the others continue without ‘noticing’ there’s a space not filled. It’s a neat trick and Warpaint do it well, maybe slightly too often but that’s a nitpicking complaint really. It works because the band are so ridiculously tigh - as well as the isolated portions of motorik on ‘Composure’ and scattergun drumming on ‘Shadows’ each member gets their own periods to showcase their talents but they work better in unison. Theresa Wayman’s rippling waves of guitar work throughout are delightfully sonorous; be it pinging like Foals, chiming with occasional Byrdsian swagger or, on ‘Shadows’, with a little touch of Latin bite to the flavour.
The two bands that have come up as reference points in our notes the most are Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Nirvana. The first isn’t a surprise considering that both current and former guitarists from the band (Klinghoffer and Frusciante respectively) have played and produced for them during their career, and it’s also a rather larger plus that they don’t have Anthony Kiedis’s funk-rap guff laid over the top of the guitar lines. Nirvana seems a stranger one to attach to this band though - lead-off single ‘Undertow’ manages to evoke the rubbery, aquatic rumble of ‘Come as You Are’ and some of the phrasing and delivery recalls ‘Polly’. Many of the other basslines seem to suggest the Seattle band or the watery grooves of The Cure.
‘Undertow’ itself is the biggest success story on the record - it captures everything they do well and throws in a chorus which has found itself buried into our brains, no doubt helped by the worming away of the nimble guitar work. The flipside of this are ‘Warpaint’ and ‘Majesty’, which are too dense to escape from themselves and during their droning was the only times we found ourselves checking run time on an album with an average track length of over five minutes.
The band’s biggest assets belong to the vocal harmony and magnetic bass work of Jenny Lee Lindberg. While Emily Kokal’s ghostly, phased dream-pop vocals are much better than you’d expect them to be on a record like this - there are moments that bring to mind Liz Fraser, Siouxsie Sioux, Bilinda Butcher and PJ Harvey - it’s when the vocals click in harmony, seeming to illicit a pained sexual yearning with the stealthy, priapic rumblings underpinning it that the record is at it’s beguiling best.
Even more of a surprise is the acoustic, folky number ‘Baby’ which is the only song on which the lyrics seemed noticeable as opposed to being atmosphere builders, and has the rustic, campfire elegance of pre-Domino Animal Collective. The final track, ‘Lissie’s Heart Murmer’ was yet another leftfield turn at the end of the record; we did even wonder whether we’d accidently nudged Beach House onto our playlist when the rolling piano started-up until the vocals came in. Why it was imagined as the first track we’ll never know, as it whirls and crashes to conclusion and the melody gets sucked circling down, it’s the perfect ending to one of the most intriguing and impressive American debuts of the year.