Warpaint >> A sordid spot, a monster takeover

California Month continued, tremor #24:

Warpaint - "Composure"

(Rough Trade Records, 2010)

Warpaint are one of the most discussed underground bands of the modern moment, and for good reason.  Yes, that's Shannyn Sossamon's sister on bass, and Shannyn was the band's original drummer, but hard-hitting new drummer Stella Mozgawa is a big step up.  And yes, they are singing "The clit cut," supposedly a reference to the film Antichrist, in the beginning...

It's good to hear some neo-post-punkers who understand the intangibles of the genre and don't try to get too dancey or sloganeering, like most of these kind of bands tend to do.  Warpaint have one foot firmly in the atmospherics of dream pop, and obviously have a great sense of melody.  What I'm saying is, a lot of the original female post-punk singers of the '80s were so busy trying to bleat away atonally that they squandered their femininity in a bid for credibility, trying to keep up with the nihilistic male Joneses of the day.  Warpaint have two female singers who both unabashedly sing in a "pretty" way.  The band's post-punk aspect is really centered in their rhythm section: angular basslines and tribal-inflected drumming. So basically, their sound incorporates the best of both of my favorite musical worlds.  They're almost like two totally different bands glued together into one, Frankenstein-style.

I watched this particular clip a lot in the time leading up to seeing them live back in April:

I liked their performance so much that I bought both of their CDs, The Fool and Exquisite Corpse, at that show, but I already mentioned that back in April.  Warpaint released a limited colored-vinyl 7" ("Undertow" b/w "Warpaint") for Record Store Day a few days after I saw them live, but I didn't know about it until a few months later, so I missed out.  Well damn.  Also, I skipped Warpaint last year at One Eyed Jacks because they were opening for a band that I dislike, Akron / Family.  In hindsight, I should've gone anyway.

A small sampling of my cassettes; photos taken in Oct. 2002:

I've sold lots of these, and some (e.g. Mötley Crüe, Duran Duran) were bought at thrift stores for irony value, and there are some I still have never bothered to listen to (Rush, Voivod, Fluf), and there are some I listened to a trillion times in my car (e.g. Social Distortion's self-titled, Fugazi's In On The Kill Taker, two by Bailter Space, Skid Row's Slave To The Grind, Screaming Trees' Sweet Oblivion, Morella's Forest's Super Deluxe, Faith No More's The Real Thing & Introduce Yourself, Unwound's The Future Of What, Alice In Chains' Dirt).  Note Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain at bottom right... See previous post.  A couple have J-cards that I made myself, such as for Bardo Pond's Amanita and Black Flag's The First Four Years.  I have over 600 cassettes nowadays, but since my current car doesn't have a tape deck, I should probably trim it down to about half of that.

I heard a pretty amazing thing on WWL radio (870 AM) yesterday involving local political corruption.  The host, Spud McConnell, said that Disney wanted to open a branch of Disney World on the northshore of New Orleans in the late '70s, but so many local politicians had their hands out asking for bribe money that Disney got fed up and the deal fell through.  I was up there on Monday, where I visited the Northlake Nature Center, got two great little cacti at Inwood Gardens, and lots of used books, and saw a truck with the bumper sticker "I'd Rather Be... HUNTING YANKEES."  It's not a redneck haven, though.  I read once that this parish (county), St. Tammany, has the best public school system in the U.S.  I also got a bottle, for olive oil apparently, that's shaped like a female torso:

Believe it or not, Adina Howard got married the other day!

Thanks for all that stuff you did, Steve Jobs.  The best one-sentence eulogy I can give is to point out that I've used only Apple computers & computing products since the late '80s, and never considered for even a split-second moving to PCs / Windows.  Coincidentally, last week Apple discontinued the iPod, a device which was basically the nail in the coffin of the cassette as an audio medium when it came out in 2001.  But it looks like the cassette was able to stick around on life support long enough to have an underground revival and outlast its supposed killer.

Planets with similar climates: Sonic Youth - "Becuz" (1995), Lush - "Light From A Dead Star" (1993), Killing Joke - "Love Like Blood" (1985), Magic Dirt - "Ice" (1994), PJ Harvey - "Big Exit" (2000).