What is warpaint? A disguise? A source of courage? Something to dismay your enemy? Ancient? Modern?
The answer to this question is that it’s anything that you want it to be; prop, alter-ego, practical joke. This diaphanous versatility is reflected in the band named Warpaint‘s music, an at times amorphous gathering of dry funk, stripped back indie, refracted hip-hop and Laurel Canyon sweetness, all swished together and bonded like an intoxicant – heady and pure, languid but strong, and calm under its sheen.
When their eponymous second album introduced the LA based four piece to a wider audience, it seemed very much a mass of similar contradictions, a boho mix of influences reflecting back the respective ‘painters cosmopolitan personal backgrounds and circumstances. Direct wasn’t a word for it back then but here, almost before we’ve been properly introduced to ‘Heads Up‘ as a thing, along comes the what you hear is what you get tones of ‘New Song‘ – by their standards an absolute banger – with a construction so pop Carly Rae could be warbling it and you wouldn’t miss a beat.
For an outfit usually long on artistic expression in as many formats as they can grab, it may surprise that beats are more important to the foursome – Emily Kokal (vocals, guitar), Theresa Wayman (vocals, guitar), Jenny Lee Lindberg (bass) and Australian Stella Mozgawa (drums) – than first impressions might suggest, with past citations for electronic music’s many ley lines as parts of their composite. That these were less to the fore previously hadn’t really seemed to matter, but on ‘Heads Up’ many choices now seem to be determined by the direct route, the skeletal beats of ‘Don’t Wanna‘ and ‘By Your Side‘s chunky abstractions peeling away some of their dreamier layers, although perhaps disappointingly the spectral ‘Dre‘ is a homage in name only.
This new simplicity is at least in some way deliberate according to Lindberg, but there are still echoes in much of what they do, fragments from other rooms which sometimes come in a whisper. On ‘Above Control‘ they sound as entranced as ever, fascinated more by the groove and interlocking than extricating guitars from melodies insistent but vulnerable. This contrasts wildly with the rumbling, post punk threat of ‘So Good‘, as close as they come on ‘Heads Up’ to the nihilism of Savages, another all-woman band at the forefront of separating being female from feminine exploitation, a subject both are keen to contextualise.
Some of this freer thinking caused controversy, but Warpaint it would seem just want to be your average-different girl group, their truce with a male dominated business uneasy but holding. Perhaps this is what makes their shapes not always easy to recognise, but whilst they favour poise over drama, they still make articulate teachers; ‘Heads Up’s finest moments are when ‘The Stall‘ shifts from an icy promise of salvation to luscious, underscored 3 in the morning intimacy, or via closer ‘Today Dear’s moribund acoustic guitar lines and throwback, folk engendered vocals.
Stopping to make people listen seems to be the elusive quality: ‘Heads Up’ demands your attention in the least forceful way, a dozen frequencies in operation at the same time, all balanced but different. To do this so effectively doesn’t take craft, more like a rolling, collective instinct.
Warpaint spend most of it taking you where they want you to go: by the time they’re done, you know what’s beneath the mask even if you’re never told.
