25 April 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Johnnie Cluney // Sound Engineering by Patrick Stolley
Pray forth to the visionaries who first developed peyote because here comes a new descendant, someone with the spitting image of the same peoples, the same straight nose, hairline, wiry lines and eyesight. Its bugle call, announcing advancement or arrival, is the sound of hellhounds and the howls of junkyard dogs hungry and willing to chew off their feet to satiate the hollow gonging of the stomach, its bargained pleading. It’s the sound of coyotes far off in the desert distance, sending smoke signals to the rest of the pack out roaming around the hunting fields, mangy but adamant about finding some meaty legs and ribs for dinner, for the fire that they’ll learn to make when the sun sets. ... [Story Continues Below]
First song
Migration Wind (White Denim) [3.24MB] [2412 downloads]
– unreleased; original version will appear on a forthcoming full-length album
Look! It’s the benign Lufthwaffe! The airlift may be over now, yet still we hunger. The patterns I see in flocks of birds remind me of Russian peoples being sucked down escalator shafts into the bowels of islands. When we all emerge though, we do so on wings. It’s then even the dourest spirit takes flight. There is a noise up there, of air flitting through the feathers of success. Lower your guns and just watch.
Second song
Don't Look That Way At It (White Denim) [2.61MB] [2251 downloads]
– unreleased; original version will appear on a forthcoming full-length album
While wandering backwards through a crooked street in Mexico, watching the hombres del cartel shake packages in the air and juggle them and laugh into the alleys knowing they had paid and were safe and we all slowly step backwards, inching footsteps against jagged old colonial cobblestone and we step faster and faster and escape becomes a reality and we know that safety lies in distance and we run and we watch the jag of the cobble as it blurs into an indistinct line zigging vertically and otherwise as we dash away from the perceived danger of an innocuous encounter.
Third song
Heart Attack (White Denim) [1.78MB] [2163 downloads]
— unreleased
I am Bishop Massive and I have lost love and I am a part of this sound. I leave a home I know for ice and hardship, but I love mankind and when man doesn’t love me back I get shocked and I feel reality in a way I don’t intend to. You’re a good human and it damages me. Come and talk, and please put gloves on. I live in my own apartment, There aren’t any roommates. We can speak in Spanish or Russian.
Fourth song
Paint Silver Gold (White Denim) [1.67MB] [2078 downloads]
– original version appears on the band’s RCRD LBL EP
OPEN THE BARN DOOR! I will wake up every animal in this den! I am not afraid of spilt milk. You! Don’t look this way. I shake you. I shake pens and houses, foundations of buildings. I learn new things! Things get shook up! You talk to me. Don’t talk to me like what. I know what moves. I’ve seen and believe the movement of bodies I’ve seen and inhaled the smell of the movement of planets. I am not afraid of shake. I will move. I am involved in the movement of things. I am granola. I nugget you the passenger side.
It’s the sound of spontaneous combustion, setting off a chain of unlikely blazes. It makes you break out into seizures and loops, traveling on the bullet train to tarnation – but with benefits, with perks that are better than parole. White Denim, the Austin, Texas, three-piece is this coming, this marauding, three-headed horseman of explosive guitars and scorpion testosterone, blowing everything in its way back two counties, ripping clothing and skepticism into confetti and raffling off the pedestrian way of doing rock and roll to anyone who will take it in this seller’s market. Go over to your DVD closet or the quicker alternative, YouTube, and watch the way that Jimi Hendrix makes pants-on love to his death row-ed guitar just before lighting it on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival decades ago. All of the things that the eyes capture in those few minutes are hazy reflections of the very manners by which Steve Terebecki, James Petralli and Joshua Block adhere to, without fail. Any moron could pick up on the Hendrix influence in the band’s own purple-veined, pulsating and soulful bleedings, but it’s more the sensation that led the guy to his overdose and his own drive that they deem the animal which they’d prefer to track down and tame – or shake up and fuck with to make wilder and more feral. They’d ramble behind it and pin a tail onto that animal. Back in California, there sitting on his calves, Hendrix is possessed, freeing the demons that must have gotten locked into the body of his guitar, chomping his gum (always that gum – the devil’s gum!), summoning and summoning whatever may appear, thrusting toward the burning piece of wood and metal and ejaculating lighter fluid onto the pile to spur it on, to piss it off. There is a God of rock and roll and still no one’s seen its face – is what they might all agree to. It wasn’t Hendrix because THE god was actually the person/deity that he was chasing, the person he was trying to impress and summon. It’s more a cloud that can be spotted as a mass of shape-shifting fog and a silhouette of something globular and thematic – not anything that can have a particularly convincing claim. The gypsy mama that Petralli wails about in “Paint Silver Gold” — a pint-sized rager that feels like tripping and trailblazing and dynamic, short and sweet storytelling that is more about the disease it can foster and the endorphin-popping release it can bring – is a fiction and a flame, a dream of a flashback of a flashback. It’s when dehydration’s got a guy crawling past cactus and seeing an Aquafina bottling plant just a few paces ahead. It’s nothing at all, but a divine delusion or a hallucination of humankind getting closer to finding the face of that rock and roll god, peeling off one more concealing cloak. White Denim are motivated to get that god naked, all the way naked.
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I saw White Denim support Tapes’n Tapes last week. They bang out an awesome show. Not only is this a rad Daytrotter session, but Sean Moeller’s review is some of the most entertaining, passionate, rock’n‘roll writing I have read in a long time. Nice work all round.
White Denim: making ATX proud. What fantastic music!
Saw this band for the first time during SXSW this year and it completely changed my life – they’re one of the best bands I’ve ever seen live and absolutely at the top of Austin’s amazing scene.
“Don’t Look That Way At It” is pretty friggin’ outstanding! Great lyrics!
Damn, that was fun! Thanks, guys!
this music makes me wanna hipshake my ass through the dusty trails of joshua tree while sipping on lone star tallboys
commenting closed for this article
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nice ‘n lively!