Some bands you see live every time they hit town. Not because they’re your band necessarily, or even the band. You go because they’re a band – a live band for the ages. Outside Emo’s after Warpaint let out on Thursday night, that refrain played over and over from rapturous patrons: “It was my first time, but I’ll never miss them again.”
In 2010, after the L.A. quartet – front guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg, and rainmaker Stella Mozgawa – broke out at South by Southwest, they returned locally for ACL Fest, performing before noon on a Sunday. Spread out evenly across the stage, the group’s visual front belied the singular hypno pulse. Promoting their self-titled sophomore disc during a three-night stand warming up for the National at the Moody Theater in 2014, Warpaint’s simmer turned sulphuric.
On E. Riverside Drive last night, they split the difference in introducing new third LP Heads Up.
Half-submerged in a haze leftover from some Eighties John Carpenter spook, the band turned the very idea of Fifties/Sixties girl groups on its beehive hairdo. Harmonies defined siren-esque – far-off, echoed, beckoning – while the long/tall/lean undulation of the three guitarists when they triangulated near the drum riser loomed iconic in tandem to the aquatic currents of the women. Warpaint plays literal surf music, not tremolo barrelling, but deep blue washes of rhythm.
Throb guitar, slap drums, bass draining like blood into a warm bath, they mesmerized the approximately 300-400 people boxed in up front. First LP night light “Undertow” floated on Kokal and Wayman’s dual lead vocal murmur, the former eschewing her guitar to take up the mic and work the lip of the stage. The latter also put down her axe at one point (even picking up the bass for a tune), yet when the pair engaged in an ecstatic weave of knitting needle leads, the Velvet Underground stirred in its crypt.
Lindberg, meanwhile, kept it all afloat with a liquid back-and-forth akin to a waterbed.
On 2015 single “No Way Out,” Aussie backbone Mozgawa culminated the first half of the 75-minute main set having levitated her drum kit. She soft-walloped her toms, ticked out eddies on her hi-hat, and tickled electro beats. A silhouette of hair, elbows, and sticks, Mozgawa played Poseidon – oceanic percussion – while her bandmates practiced Can, Siouxsie Sioux, and Björk.
“Feeling comfortable enough in your body to dance?” wondered Kokal, beginning to bust a move. “Now’s the time to dance.”
“[Feel it] deep in your uterus,” added Wayman. “Even if you don’t have a uterus.”
Triptych before the encore, Warpaint’s drowsy dare “Love Is to Die” set the stage for obvious Heads Up takeaway “New Song,” a would-be Eighties smash and live staple forever forward, followed by one-half of a viral video mash-up, the metronomic, almost robotic Krautrock of “Disco//Very.” It’s better half, third and last tune of the encore “Keep It Healthy,” burrowed a weave of subatomic tones shifting as majestically as weather patterns.
“South by Southwest really did everything for us as a band,” humbled Kokal before the last tune.
Afterward, she put an even finer point on 100 total minutes of pure bliss – life-saving musical antidote to election day, equally righteous for grrrls and dudes of all ages.
“Thank you, Austin. We love you. You never disappoint. You never disappoint.”
Likewise.
This article appears in November 18 • 2016.
