WARPAINT
RELEASED 17TH JAN 2014
Following up ‘The Fool’ is certainly no easy task; woozy, sleepy and beautiful, it provided something brilliantly defiant in the face of 2010 guitar music.
With the haunting live shows of a few years back becoming a distant memory, Warpaint’s next effort has received a fully merited arsenal of hype, with single ‘Love Is To Die’ leading the way. Dropped amongst the dark evenings of December, the track began all the fuss, with glitchy notes and distant bass rumbles forming a prominent ever-growing sound, as the listener is nurtured into an inevitable love.
Having been holed up in the studio for some time, the self-titled ‘Warpaint’ opposed to its predecessor opts for a solitary angle with individual and building instrumentation. This creates an intimate listening experience, the kind to which you want to sit in a darkened room and light a candle to. It’s not the kind of record you can dip into as and when, it requires time, you need to fully immerse yourself in it. ‘Keep It Healthy’ is a caressing as it is powerful, and in a time when certain females in pop-culture are doing their best to devalue themselves, Warpaint, stimulant and sophisticated, are above all that.
Intricate guitar-work feels very much like a staple of this album, with ‘Tease’ and ‘CC’ opening with patient strings, grounding each song amidst the labyrinth of Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman’s vocals. Assembled upon an isolated piano line, ‘Son’ closes on a poignant and teary note. It’s ridiculously easy to depict these broody anthem burst out of the festival bins this summer.
Warpaint have not only overcome that dreaded second album, but they’ve fashioned an album that will go down in the history books, boldly proving they’re here to stay.