I’ve always relied on my friend Katy to tell me who to listen to. When I returned from a months-long trip to India, she handed me a mix CD with a hand-collaged liner stuffed inside. “This is what you missed,” she’d written. And it was.
So in 2010, when she sent me Warpaint’s breakout single “Undertow,” I listened eagerly. The song was affecting and simple, with a strong bassline and ethereal vocals. I played it on repeat for months.
That simplicity, that desire to distill a piece’s component parts, runs like a tight current through the Los Angeles rock band’s eponymous new album. I spoke with Jenny Lee Lindberg–Warpaint’s bassist, guitarist and vocalist–on the phone from Europe, where the band was on tour. “If you keep it simple and start small, and while you’re doing that be in it and be present – the way we approached this last record is how we want to be in our everyday lives. It’s a little spiritual,” she said.
The women of Warpaint–Emily Kokal, Theresa Wayman, Stella Mozgawa and Lindberg–started recording the album over the course of a month in Joshua Tree. “Prior to that, somebody would write a song and send it to Stella, Stella would send it to me – we all recorded bits. But until then, we hadn’t been in a room fleshing ideas out with each other,” she said. They fell into a new groove; while Warpaint had prided themselves on atypical songwriting, the songs that emerged from these sessions were more controlled and traditionally structured. Lindberg says they were also “sexier, fancier and darker” than what had come before.
One would get a bassline going, another would come in on keys, another would grabbing the mic and the last band member might “hang back and keep from overcrowding it.” The idea of space as a performed presence rather than an absence to be filled feels countercultural in a society that chatters incessantly about the virtues of “multitasking” and “having it all.” She calls Warpaint a meditation.
[blockquote]“We would really like to score a horror film”[/blockquote]
The album is washed out at times, incisive at others. The music blog Pitchfork praised their debut album The Fool, but skewered Warpaint upon its January release. The reviewer called its songs “lifeless stiffs” and wrote that its members comprised “a most square thing: a jam band.” Lindberg didn’t read the review – she doesn’t read any reviews – but heard about it from her bandmates. “From what they said, it seemed like Pitchfork had a personal vendetta and didn’t have their facts straight. It didn’t feel constructive in any size, shape or form,” she says. Rolling Stone called Warpaint “the perfect backdrop for your next midnight séance,” Paste said it was “ultimately rewarding and full of promise” and Consequence of Sound called it both “a patient listen” and “a triumph.”
The Pitchfork review was right enough in one regard: the record has no “Undertow,” no standout catch. “Disco//very” is as close as they come to getting the listener up and moving, though you’d be more likely to dance in your seat. Lyrics like “I’ve got a friend with a melody that will kill / she will eat you alive” pinpoint the sexy-scary thing Warpaint’s got going on, ground well trodden by artists like Fiona Apple and CocoRosie. “Disco//very”’s reduced beat conjures up the image of a woman in the depths of winter, reluctantly dressing for a party. It’s Miss Havisham sifting through a case of dirty rubies, that scene in Casper where Christina Ricci dons the lace number she’s pulled from the attic. In concert, Warpaint’s aesthetics often mirror their sound, whether the women are in sumptuously accessorized floral gowns or flowing white chiffon.
When I spoke with Lindberg, Warpaint was coming off a night out in Amsterdam celebrating Mozgawa’s birthday and feeling groggy. But the road grind’s nothing new. They toured on The Fool for two and a half years, in a bus, sprinters, planes and vans they drove themselves. In the ten years Warpaint has been a band, they haven’t only watched each other grow up, they’ve watched the scene change around them. “When we first came out, we were almost a novelty – like, ‘Oh, an all-girl band where the girls can actually play their instruments!’ Now there are a lot of girl bands that have depth. It feels pretty powerful to be a part of that. But not in a feminist way; it’s more subtle. It’s almost that everyone’s being treated as equals.”
When the tour ends, “we would really like to score a horror film,” Lindberg says. “The last one I saw that I loved was The Conjuring. I really like paranormal teen romance. Just anything where lots of emotions are being felt.”
My favorite song on Warpaint, “Son,” contains the lyric “you can see the reason why your story is not over.” Warpaint doesn’t do everything I wanted it to do: that’s frankly true. But it’s small and self-indulgent to judge a piece of work simply as a thing that does or doesn’t perform to your imagination of it. There is an abundance of material here; flawless sound mixing by Nigel Godrich, as well as gorgeous instrumentation and layered vocals. As in their Chris Cunningham-directed “Love is To Die,” which flatly resembles an old Metric music video, these pieces don’t always come together for maximum effect. But even when buried, Warpaint’s talent and character is ever-present. You can see the reason.