Albums and Abominations

By Benjamin Huber-Rodriguez     1/27/14 6:00pm

When Beach House, a Maryland duo, first put out minimalist tracks with spacey, echoing vocals, the music community dubbed it "dream pop." That same style quickly caught on and was reinterpreted until the genre was saturated with watered-down dance music, shoegaze and everything in between. Luckily, Warpaint has emerged from the late 2000's dream pop swamp with new music that is simultaneously subtle and powerful while placing the listener exactly where the genre intended: in a dreamlike trance that moves and sways with the dips and turns

of the album.  

Warpaint is a four-piece all girl band from Los Angeles who found a deal with notable indie label Rough Trade after their music was discovered on MySpace. Warpaint is the group's second full-length album, a follow-up to 2010's The Fool. While the sonics have changed little since that record, early 2014 seems an ideal time to inject some oscillating, waltzing balladry after last autumn's run of big rock records (Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, etc.). Intro track "Keeping it Healthy" begins with a beautiful guitar arpeggio over a 7/8 rhythm that seems to be constantly building to some explosion, only to fall back to a snare and toms marching beat behind spacey falsettos and punctuating bass notes. 

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Many tracks on the album tiptoe the fine line between excellent, complex arrangements and going for too much. However, more often than not, the band succeeds. On "Feeling Right," a jagged, Radiohead-esque high hat pattern plays around with a bouncing bass line and spacey, interplaying guitars that fill the song from either side of the stereo production, while the vocals sit atop the symmetrical structure with a chorus of echoes before the drums finally break the peace for the song's final 20 seconds. When the band diverges from the quite flexible formula of intricate arrangements and interesting, rhythmic drum patterns, the results are mixed. "Teese" succeeds as a bare-minimalist strummer that skims along a pond surface but never breaks through. But on "Disco/Very," the dancefloor backbeat and overproduced, pop-style vocals are both grating and an unwelcome break in the halcyon atmosphere created by the album.  

As a whole, the lyrics of the record fit the music well but fail to describe anything interesting. The journey taken on "Keep It Healthy" aligns with the song's wandering pace. 

Warpaint is highly visual, with each track transporting the listener to various nighttime scenes that tell more of a story than the words ever could. The band plays to their strength, producnig detailed, layered pieces that turn the listener's head around with each listen, and in doing so, eclipse any preconceived notions about what their band is supposed to be or sound like. So what do they sound like? That depends entirely on one's own imagination. 

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