My base-level reaction to White Denim-- a trio who have seemingly never met neither a tempo they can't shift out of at a second's notice nor a branch of psychedelia they can't pluck from-- is a sense of jitteriness and slight unease, which could be what they're aiming toward. Yet once I start to gain a real feel for the band, I don't get the sense, as I do with many of their contemporaries, that they're merely reverent pastiche artists. Oh, there's plenty about their latest album Fits that pulls from the past-- the blistering fury of Love's "7 and 7 Is" is an obvious touchstone; the Doors' lusty freak-bliss pops up often. But at the same time, the band's choice of name and its aesthetic penchant for surface-level representation makes me think that, far from flipping through back issues of Creem for inspiration, they situate themselves in a nostalgia-for-the-present feedback loop.
Still, the first thing listeners will notice about White Denim is the way they switch sounds so abruptly: In opener "Radio Milk How Can You Stand It", the first two-thirds of the song is standard White Denim-- bass that sounds like it's reverberating from underground, percussion that chatters like wind-up plastic teeth, James Petralli's squawk mirrored by chippy, dirty guitars. Then after a millisecond pause, drums lock with guitar, a skronky sax appears, and Petralli's register shifts to a bluesy howl. The song, still satisfying and surprising on the 10th listen as on the first, could have been drawn from the catalog of any number of psych-based power trios, but it's executed well and makes for a great opener. More often, however, Fits features hippie paeans like "Mirrored and Reverse", bearing a wispy semi-refrain that suggests the Byrds' Fifth Dimension, without bringing much more to the table than atmosphere.
For all the moments Fits locks in and finds a groove strong enough to hang a hook on, it more often slides right past, on some sort of restless vision quest for something it's bound not to find. First single "I Start to Run" sounds like the Red Hot Chili Peppers circa Mother's Milk (there, I said it), and if they want to grind out propulsive, gonzo funk pastiche that's okay with me. It's when the group hints at something bigger and grander without manifesting something out of their ambitions, like on the album's last two songs, "Regina Holding Hands" and "Syncn", that I stop paying attention and instead start anticipating their next EP. "Regina" dispenses with any timbre resembling "honk" or "slap," substituting strummy acoustic guitar and a bluesy wail. "Syncn" ends the record on an even breezier note, Petralli's vocals holding in a creaky upper register that makes him sound like Devendra Banhart.
Incendiary live shows, sure, but White Denim are a product of the Internet, first and foremost. And their path has taken the sort of weird turns that one might expect for a band seeking to distinguish itself in a virtual market where seemingly everything's already been done. Their first EP was promising, to say the least, and since then they've released two very similar "follow-ups", Exposion and Workout Holiday, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, which folded those songs in with a bunch of others that failed to pack as much of a punch. And so Fits feels like the band's formal first LP-- lots of what makes them unique, and then those somewhat awkward "growth" points. That initial itchiness, in other words, never really goes away.
