WARPAINT - Warpaint

Releasing an album four years after the hype and critical success of their debut, "The Fool", with the bold presumption of titling the follow-up "Warpaint" speaks to a self-aware tautonymy, born of a sense of self and a personality determined to prove its own worth.

Warpaint, the four women from Los Angeles, California, keep their artistic and instrumental calling intact, plugging their ears and shutting their eyes to the trends of the moment: the new "Warpaint" is a sound flowing in continuity with their past work, a cyclical, repetitive movement unfolding piece by piece, played and willed into being by Emily Kokal (vocals, guitar), Theresa Wayman (guitars, vocals), Jenny Lee Lindberg (bass) and Stella Mozgawa (drums), but shaped by the production "sanctity" of Flood (Mark Ellis) and the mixing work of Nigel Godrich.

We're not listening to an open universe here; it's more about immersing yourself in a system that's musically permeable to just a few outside influences: dark-ambient ("Disco // Very"), those the African continent offers up to the Western ear ("Keep It Healty"), and those capable of bypassing the line between ok and ko, cautiously working their way into the sonic metaphors of the "independent" intercontinental listener.

"Love Is To Die" could easily stake a claim as one of the hit singles of the coming year, with a heartbeat of synthesizers and deep bass, foreshadowing funereal trip-hop farewells ("Hi") with Del Naja and Yorke lurking in the background of a twilit afternoon.

"Warpaint" is a crisp sonic dream: it keeps melancholy, rather than darkness, as its guiding thread, with whispers turned into notes courtesy of Cocteau Twins ("Drive", the album's high point along with closer "Son") and Blonde Redhead, a clear touchstone for the Californians; so it is that sleep turns out calm and serene, or else tormented and clammy, unable to bear a lament that stretches on for some fifty minutes, pumping the faint cerebral bloodflow right along the borderline of half-sleep for the entire length of the record.

"Warpaint" is a record for those who appreciate continuity, that intimate yet carnal sexual bond, that stretched-out sense of a future waiting to arrive, waiting for someone to feed it by waking up from the dream.

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01/01/2014