Pillager Villager: Warpaint

 A friend asked for some music to do his taxes to and I didn’t know what band I should hand over for sacrifice. It just seems insulting, doesn’t it?

The impulse can be understood. Or, rather, you don’t listen to music with your eyes. Eyes carry math, instruction, narrative. Ears enhance the experience. Eyes are arms and ears are fingertips. But what I can’t fathom is being the band that’s excited when someone says, “You guys made me love turning on Quicken in 2010.”

But the band I gave him was Warpaint—we unfortunately only have their EP Exquisite Corpse to put our fingerprints on. They’re from the solar Los Angeles and Wikipedia tells us Heath Ledger liked them (Shannyn Sossaman, who was Ledger’s love interest in the forgettable-and-overeagerly-soundtracked A Knight’s Tale was once a drummer for Warpaint). Picture the band as that: angels in clown makeup.  Sad and shaky and celestial.

And cold. Warpaint’s echo-voiced chanteuses and chokey cricket-guitars are the kind of cold that grows in the shadows beneath grass. Listening to the best song out of the five, “Billie Holliday,” is like waking up on the lawn in the summer and finding the grass nearly icy even though the sun’s still warm as a bonfire. The swoopy strings off the first song “Stars” channel those befuddling post-nap minutes while you assemble the memories you had before drifting off. Replicating this coy immediacy of experience is one of Warpaint’s prime strengths. Folks try to draw similarities between Warpaint and other bedroom rock acts like The xx. Other than the obvious aesthetic contrasts Warpaint doesn’t sound distant. The singers seem wounded.

“You guys made me love turning on Quicken in 2010.”

When the guitars and drums escape from the smarting voices there’s a little Mars Volta blood. Call it renaissance festival progrock—the band seems to be afraid of thrashing (though they get frustratingly close on “Elephants”). Instead they bounce like whatever the funk it’s called that the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s are doing (John Frusciante helps “Beetles” with its repeated lyrics “Why can’t I just get it together/ where’s my shit/Oh my god I’m bad at it/Ohmygod I’m bad at it!” is closest the group gets to pop. Even then the frenetic shouts only bookend underwater pulses of dream guitar—the kind of whorls of guitar filmmakers need to score brooding or disbelief within a hospital hallway.

But while I listen to Warpaint while doing other things—namely walking or the dishes—they aren’t what I would call passive. They’re secretive, which can be confused with passivity, but offer intimacy that can only be discovered by tracing and retracing your fingerprints upon them like a lover’s polished collarbone or the eyes of a stuffed animal.