It's a rare feat to see an indie rock band as stylishly presented as Warpaint is on their self-titled second album. The Los Angeles quartet's 2010 debut The Fool certainly got them to an admirable level of success, albeit one where having either Flood produce or Nigel Godrich mix the follow-up would be a serious coup; nearly three years in the making, Warpaint has both. Acclaimed video director Chris Cunningham is on board as well, contributing the arresting visuals for first single "Love Is to Die" as well as the cover art. Judging from the talent involved, this all sounds like a massive, star-making rollout from the second Clinton term and unfortunately, Warpaint plays the part too well. Digging in the used CD crates to exhume hours of rightfully ignored post-OK Computer paranoid androids, catatonic trip-hop, and gluttonous Francophile ambience, Warpaint spends 2014 remembering everything 1999 tried to forget.
But for all of Warpaint’s fashionable aesthetics and packaging, they're a most square thing: a jam band. And not even a jam band in the fairgrounds-conquering sense most understand it, where typical verse-chorus structure serves as a jumping off point for indulgent, technically flashy solos. The thrill of seeing Warpaint’s uncanny, egoless instrumental interplay in a live setting didn’t always translate on The Fool, though the record did serve as a good preview. There, Warpaint went past mere jamming, conjuring music into existence, hazy vistas of desert blues, cavernous post-punk, and disembodied, ghostly vocals, summoned to create alluring mirage rock.
But on Warpaint, the band goes from raising spirits to the embalming business, adding layers and layers of polish to lifeless stiffs. To their credit, they haven't changed their compositional approach; though the sound is vastly more lustrous, expansive, and expensive, each individual player is emphasized in a manner that emboldens the group collectively. In her first record since joining the band, drummer Stella Mozgawa is mixed as a lead instrument, and Lindberg’s bass is often tasked with not just the melodic framework, but the actual melodies. Meanwhile, the vocals of Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman are given crystalline spaces of their own to act as texture, while their guitars are either padding or swapped out for whooshing synthesizers. It’s a total inversion of pop music, which seems to have been the point.
And like every guitar-based band as of late, Warpaint have stressed that they’ve spent the past four years listening to anything but guitar-based music, seeking out as much R&B and hip-hop as possible. They’ve called Warpaint a mashup with Jay-Z. They also called Warpaint their Dark Side of the Moon. They’re not exactly wrong—the ponderous, bottom-heavy tempos of Warpaint are a triangulation point between space-rock and rap. But while trip-hop has long been derogated as functional lifestyle music, it began as a forward-thinking deconstruction, and the difference between the titans of the genre to which Warpaint has been errantly compared (Portishead, Massive Attack) and the forgotten second tier were the same things that guide pop music from time immemorial: a compelling vocal presence, innovation, a perspective, or more briefly, songs.
The way Warpaint hopscotch through the tricky guitar figures on “Keep It Healthy” is satisfying from a technical standpoint, as is the syncopated, hollowed-out riff of “Biggy” or any number of their muscular rhythmic structures—it’s all the work of accomplished musicians, a rare proficiency that never devolves into showmanship. But the arrangements twist themselves into knots Kokal and Wayman can’t untie—vocal melodies invariably bob, weave, dip and dart, trying so hard to find a sliver of space that they never resolve into a memorable pattern. For the most part, Warpaint take the path of lesser resistance, lapsing into the same layered coos that defined The Fool, but now that they’re mixed to be a focal point, the melodic inertia makes Warpaint’s 51 minutes feel three times as long.
“Teese” slumps its way towards a chorus that recalls Dot Allison’s “Colour Me”, though I’m not suggesting that Warpaint are trying to pull a fast one on us. The problem is that “Teese”, like so much of Warpaint, instantly reminds one of a third-wave chillout chanteuse. “Love Is to Die” stands out for having some kind of verse-chorus structure, as well as the most discernible bit of ineffectual relationship balm (“Love is to die/ Love is to not die/ Love is to dance”). There’s almost no way to make a smooth segue towards that gawky, tuneless hook, and yet, the pivot from the key in the verse is especially awkward.
More troubling than the lack of hooks is the way Warpaint operate in their new, immaculate surroundings like they’re worried about a security deposit, barely leaving a fingerprint on these air-streamed synths, let alone getting their hands dirty. They try to create atmosphere in an airlock, lumbering instead of fostering groove, failing to generate any heat or friction as nearly every interesting turn on these songs happens within the first minute. Even with Godrich and Flood at their disposal, Warpaint work within a limited dynamic range, relying on a busier cymbal pattern or the introduction of a slightly different synth to instigate a tonal shift, but never a crescendo. Their melodic and textural limitations are even more pronounced when during their protracted genre experiments. The M.I.A.-style enunciation and warping vocal effects of “Disco // very” are every bit as forced as the titular pun, but rigorously scheduled playtime is better than none at all. “Drive” similarly makes its source material all too obvious, and it sounds even more dated than its surroundings, a big-budget rendering of the handcrafted, Italo-inspired dark pop whose moment just disappeared in the rearview.
Even those sympathetic to what Warpaint are doing have all but admitted this album lacks hooks, grooves, or even a pulse most of the time—relying on the idea of it as “grower” or an “immersive experience.” But the question never gets answered: to what end are we indulging these jams? As pop, it’s unconscionably tuneless, as transportive space-rock, it’s not analog enough to be charmingly retro, and certainly not futuristic. The lyrics are symptomatic of Warpaint itself, failing to impress or even engage, assuming distance and emotional vacancy necessarily equal “mystery.” So even as a proxy for makeout sessions, it fails—it sits completely still and makes you do all the work. It fittingly does make its demands in a very late-90s way, assuming its status as a limited resource (i.e., a big-budget rock album from an up-and-coming band) for a captive audience either tuned into MTV, the local alternative radio station, or just $17 in the hole and demanding some kind of return on investment. But as the saying goes, time is money and Warpaint is the sound of both disappearing into the void.
