Warpaint, we barely knew ye

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Welcome to a new installment of our infinite-parts series nestled cozily into our Say Goodbye section and entitled “We barely knew you,” hereby changed to “We barely knew ye,” because it sounds more wistful, and we are all about wist.

Somewhere between Coco Rosie's art-house caravan and the Vivian Girls' weathered tour van there is a creeping unspoken conversation that never goes away no matter how much its imagery might nag, about how hot girls playing instruments can go a long way before men who write about them on blogs actually listen to their songs. (For the record, this laptop-wielder has always been a fan of weathered tour vans and all they produce.)

But to the matter at hand. Remember when there was a David Longstreth look-alike in Warpaint? No? This guy:

No chance they'd excite as many hype machines if he was still around. Warpaints are now four leggy LA girls, as they were once, when their ex-drummer was Shannyn Sossamon, who dropped out to become a model. Their new one could be one, as well.

What were we talking about?

You can hear it in crowd mega-favs like “Undertow” — these girls are playing two notches less aggro but content-wise pretty much the same shit as mid-oughts dance punk revivalism, or three notches more produced than the more unpredictable and chance-taking Effi Briest — that paradigm of moody, beat-driven melodic rock, that in Warpaints case, is far too slick to really be a strain of psychedelia. (People throw that term around a lot these days, no?)

Their debut album The Fool comes out October 25. Not only will it get all the accolades that revolve around a “Best New Music”, they will end up being one of the more successful touring bands of the next year or so. It doesn't take expertise to call these things, they just wear the formula on their sleeves.