The Internet can be a bad friend to emerging bands. They post their music on MySpace, attract some attention, play some shows, but by the time they roll out a record, people have moved on to the Next Big Thing. Once in a while, there comes a band that explodes onto the blogosphere and makes it out alive. One such example is Warpaint. An all-female quartet hailing from L.A., the band managed to not only attract attention with their 2008 EP, “Exquisite Corpse,” but retain it up to the release of “The Fool.” Anything but foolish, the album manages to build a consistent dreamlike atmosphere through swirling guitars and reverberating vocals. An expertly mixed record, “The Fool” is not a light album. On the contrary, the instrumentation is fog-like and thick, the vocals tempting and unsettling. Listen if you dare.
“Set Your Arms Down” opens with a halting bass line and moans in the background. Suddenly, high-pitched, falsetto vocals rise out of the gloom. “We walk through fire/My love is your flashlight” sings Emily Kokal. The parallelism drawn between the lyrics and the song is palpable: Kokal’s voice leads us through the swirling, foggy instrumentation, made up of steady guitar lines, syncopated drum beats and desperate hammerings layered on slow, ambient vocals. The beat becomes grinding and steady toward the end, while the vocals howl away. Never has there been a more ominous entrance.
“Warpaint” is the crown jewel of the album. After 15 seconds of silence at the beginning, a humming can be heard faintly rising. An arpeggiated guitar chord comes on, the drums are added to the line and finally bass and second guitar complete the picture. The sound of the drums is slightly warlike, very much like an amped-up marching band. The vocals, on the other hand, are hard to discern and emotionally flat, which makes them slightly tormenting: they acquire a strange distancing sound effect during the bridge. Coupled with the vocal play between Kokal, Theresa Wayman and Jenny Lee Lindberg, the song becomes an unsettling, stunning affair.
The apparent single is “Undertow,” a bass-driven, dreamy track. While the three voices are soft, they sound dangerous, not harmless. “Why do you want to blame me for your troubles?/You better learn your lesson yourself,” Lindberg sings. The production on the track is incredible: drums burst in and out, the voices swirl in and out on different channels and the guitar sound, although beneath low-fi, is mesmerizing in its artistry. Although less unsettling than the last track, “Undertow” gives the impression that these girls are not to be messed with.
The following track, “Bees,” is a little bit more upbeat. Percussion beats off a drum pad, along with the actual crashing cymbals from resident drummer Stella Mozgawa, give the song an extra layer of rhythm, which tones down the swirling, ethereal sound of the guitars and vocals. “Baby” is another track that deviates from the general ambiance of the album. A mostly acoustic track, the guitar and harmonized vocals sound surprisingly simple for the band, mostly because their lyrics are clear and distinct, in contrast to the heavily veiled vocals on the rest of the album.
By the end of the ninth and final track, “Lissie’s Heart Murmur,” the sound of the band has become indelible in the listener’s mind. Their misty, ambient vocals and flowing guitar line are coupled with a lazy piano line. Suddenly, the dream world, painstakingly built throughout the whole album, comes to a paralyzing stop. The vocals are swirling, the cymbals are crashing, a single piano key is pressed and the Warpaint dream, foggy and trancelike, dissolves instantly. No soft fadeouts or muffled endings. Just what one expects of the Next Big Thing.