this one’s shorter than usual but i hit a brick wall and couldn’t get past it so here you go. also this album really does rip!!!
often with music one takes away something that isn’t necessarily implicit in the text of the thing. who among us has understood a deeply moving song the first time it’s heard, at least lyrically? it’s hard to do. instead the main takeaway is a Feeling, a Mood; an atmosphere set in place by the instrumentation choices, the tone. it’s why some songs feel appropriate in certain spaces regardless of their lyrics; you wouldn’t play cap’n jazz’s cover of take on me at a child’s party. unless that child was really cool and into midwest emo, i guess. i think it’s my favourite part of art- its ability to not just influence the person experiencing the art, but the percieved space around them. go into a room with an imposing mark rothko, and you come out in a weird liminal space.
point is, mood’s important. one of the first albums to show me this, and an album still important to me eleven (!) years later, is the 2010 LP The Fool by warpaint. warpaint is a group of four girls and i had a crush on all of them when i was younger. is that important? i’m not sure. but i feel like that’s fine. i could go and research the environment that produced this album, where it was recorded and when and who engineered it and etc etc, but i don’t think that helps my case here. this album is the most insanely moody thing i’ve ever listened to.
when i think of albums with a similar dark wash, my mind immediately goes to massive attack’s mezzanine and portishead’s dummy. it’s that kind of shadowy, grimy feeling. crucially, warpaint is not a trip-hop band like the two cited. it’s a pretty standard-instrumented indie band; two guitars, bass, drums, all four musicians sing. the guitars are clean, just a hair too sombre to be jangly in the tradition of the smiths. looking at it, it feels like the bee monologue from the bee movie. according to all theories of science, there’s no way this band can sound like this.
but they do! mostly thanks to the rhythm section, which is sexy in a way that 17-year old me couldn’t quite look at straight on. i would get embarrassed playing this album alone in my room because i knew how sultry it sounded. the bass contrasts the almost-jangle of guitars so nicely, not to mention the way it plays with the register of the main singer. her voice is high- not soprano high, but definitely higher than an alto- and smooth, effortless. she isn’t belting or trying to add flourishes. it’s a simple, straightforward vocal style. when the other members of the band add their vocals, it blooms into a wash that fills the higher frequencies. it doesn’t happen too often but it feels like a distinct treat every time.
all the above is true. but it’s not really what i want to write about.
i look back at high school and i see a different person and that different person is lying in their bed listening to this album and feeling a deep yearning pull towards something they can’t identify. this is an album that feels how being a teenage girl feels. it feels both free, breaking conventions of the genre, wild and bursting with emotion and lyrics that make the heart hurt, and deeply restrained. there is a hesitance to it that enchants me. so many things in this album could have been said a different, more straightforward way, but it’s uncertain and coy. you can see the parts where they felt they were pushing it. in the song Composure the entire thing is a long dance around an ode to some kind of sex, but they let it live just out of sight instead of pulling it up to show the listener.
i have a complicated relationship with being shown the exact feeling of being a teenage girl again, to say the least. but this album makes it easy. makes me look back at past me and feel some kind of understanding with how they acted. makes me compassionate. i’d chalk it all up to nostalgia but it’s not an in-the-moment thing. it’s a feeling that stays with me hours after i’ve listened to the album, demanding self-retrospection.
are the songs trite like you’d expect from an album that sounds like being a teenage girl? they’re about breakups and getting together and the unbearable experience of being known, which have each been written about a million times. but these aren’t trite; they’re uncomfortably honest in their expression of emotion. it’s still poetry, don’t get me wrong. nobody’s doing the sun kil moon style “i’m going to lay out all my problems very plainly for four minutes” lyrics here, which is very much a plus. the lyrics feel ghostly, more than anything else. like they’re feeling themselves out as they’re being sung, every syllable a push for some direction that wasn’t there before.
from “undertow”:
“Your brown eyes are my blue skies
They light up the river that the birds fly over
Better not to quench your thirst
Better not to be the first one diving in
Though you caught me and you know why
They breathe in the deepest part of the water”
and from “lizzie’s heart murmur”:
"On the edge of the water
Where the ships pass by
And the sound of your laughter
And the endless sky
Tips my head back
Full of swimming thoughts
Beneath deep breathing
Oh I know there's clarity
Oh there's honesty with you”
it reminds me so much of the intensity i felt when i was younger. now i’m nearing 30 and my feelings are more blunted, my emotions less completely overwhelming than they used to be. i can look back and reach for the static shock intensity of what i felt when i was a teen but the sheer force of it is deeply unsettling to me now. but this album lets me dip my toes in, just enough to remember how it felt.
what happened to warpaint? they grew older and started making more straightforward indie pop. like, really straightforward indie pop. it’s not bad but it’s not notable to me. it sounds like one of those bands that inevitably gets their shit picked up and used for a car commercial. the toyota prius 3, scored by warpaint. it’s a little sad, to see a band with this deep well of emotion grow into a band with none, but it feels inevitable. i mean, they grew up too. i can’t access emotion this strong anymore (though the reasons why are of course complicated), and maybe they can’t either. or maybe this was just the right album to be made at the right time, and emerged like a fated thing from the minds of its creators.
sometimes i wish they made more albums like this. if not for me currently, then for the past version of me listening to this album over and over in their bedroom. but i think it’s good that there’s just one. it’s a crystallized moment in time and in feeling, and revisiting it is always something that plucks me bodily from where i currently am and deposits me elsewhere. it’s a powerful thing. i hope you listen to it too.
xoxoxoxo