Warpaint
Posted by Hazel on 04 January 2010
video courtesy of Athens Soundies
Warpaint hail from Echo Park, the area of LA that gave us The Mae Shi, No Age and HEALTH among others. Theirs is music for the morning after these bands’ night before. An all-girl trio consisting of Jenny Lee Lindberg, Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, Warpaint concoct seductive rolling dreamscapes where guitar riffs stud soft percussion and gurgling vocals. It’s sparse but encompassing, shifting like weather between tempos and keys.
Rough Trade picked them up post-CMU last October and their December LP, Exquisite Corpse, was the result. Its brief six tracks showcase a band rich in contrast and control, and still caught in a deliciously fragile moment of self-realisation. Its standout – Billie Holiday – takes the lyrics of Mary Well’s ‘My Guy’ and slows them to a point of exasperating beauty. Expect to see more of these girls in 2010.