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Although hailing from the sunny shores of California, Warpaint’s perpetually cloudy music evokes the monochrome dourness of a permanently rain-splattered industrial estate somewhere in Northern England circa 1980. Add to this a big pinch of heavy-lidded, reverb-laden shoegazery haze and an oft-indulged enthusiasm for stutter post-punk-funk beats, and you’ve a sound that’s both unashamedly backwards-gazing and almost achingly now.
At first, a cynical listener can’t help but reach for a pin to prick the balloon of hype generated by Warpaint’s 2009 debut EP ‘Exquisite Corpse’. To the uninitiated, Warpaint appear to be constantly holding back, as if even the band themselves weren’t completely convinced about the value of the moody sounds they’re cooking up.
Bear with it, though, and ‘The Fool’ soon starts to make sense, with the odd disjointed nature of the multi-part tracks and stop-start grooves that initially appear more clunky than funky emerging as the band’s key charms. There’s a genuine hypnotic pull to tracks like opener ‘Set Your Arms Down’, built on drums and bass circling each other warily whilst heavily reverb guitars climb ever upwards and Emily Kokal sighs sleepily as if she’s only just been awakened from a hundred years’ doze. The loose ‘Bees’ struts like Sonic Youth hitting the (strictly indie) disco, whilst impassioned highpoint ‘Shadows’ pumps up an urgency that can otherwise go missing amidst these unhurried cuts that rarely venture past the mid-tempo territory.
Worth the gushing superlatives, then? Yes and no. Apart from an appealingly sparse sound, the notes being allowed some alluring empty spaces to float in, they manage to maintain an interesting juxtaposition, with half of their points of reference preferring to skulk in the shadows with hands deep in raincoat pockets whilst other half strive to shake it to the subtly dub-influenced rhythms. They also possess something extremely valuable that so many darlings of the blogosphere forgo – a real, beating heart.
But as the songs start to get a touch malnourished towards the end and the album eventually gets stuck in a slightly monotonous default setting of drowsy cool, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that as with so many other bands put on pedestal before they’ve barely managed to warp up their first rehearsal by various musical freshness-chasers, Warpaint have been tempted to make this album-length ‘full statement’ a bit too soon.
