White Denim
Fits

It is at the intersection of my musical instincts that White Denim hits hard, that is, right in the balls. The storage area where all my love for Captain Beefheart, Minutemen, Hendrix, Mingus, the Stooges, Jeff Buckley, Herbie Hancock, Jobim, tropicalia, and hundreds of other sounds converge before branching out and feeding the rest of the body.

White Denim is a tri-partite musical anachronism in body and bipolar (if not multifaceted) in intent; surprising, almost inadmissible if you think they come straight from some lost garage in Texas with only the debut CD-r "Workout Holiday"."Fits" as their backing. It is their second album and the most delicious fruit salad I've had the chance to try in thirty years of an honorable career as an audio-phile-listener-practitioner. The first side of the record plays as the nemesis of the second and vice versa, and that's enough. From the Dadaist paroxysm of the introductory “Radio Milk” to the 'Barcelonian' hullabaloo of “El Hard Attack” delirious hardrock batucada passing through the exceptional 2'50'' Led Zeppelin epitome that is “Say What You Want”. “All Consolation” breaks the plot, a big ballad with a titanium soul where it feels like listening to XTC crossing the same psychedelic fumes of Spacemen3 and then swerving for the country twang; the minor tone fury of the single “I Start to Run” returns, which even from the video pays homage to the sound world of b-movies and b-lounge. And how can you not mentally note a track-by-track when “Everybody Somebody” boasts a wahwah-laden p-funk that would resurrect the black spirit of Funkadelic with popper sniffs and these guys seem to invite you to play "Guess Who"???

Everything right, low bass volumes in the foreground, immense voice, excellent rifferama and exaggerated rhythms against the constant hum of tube amplifiers. Right in the balls, as noted above. But it's when they dim the lights and slow down the rhythms that White Denim is simply the best thing that has happened in the pop microcosm of my ears. Just switch sides and it sounds like listening to another band, cheerful people almost better at the instruments; the combo “Sex Prayer” + “Mirrored” paints a gigantic semi-instrumental interlude that bathes on the shores of post-rock, “Paint Yourself” is wonderful in shuffling the deck between folk and Bacharach-style pop and in “I'd Have It Just the Way We Were” White Denim seems like Jeff Buckley's backing band grappling with Antonio Carlos Jobim's bossa nova repertoire. Just when you think you've heard enough, “Regina Holding Hands” and “Syncn” close the album overshadowing it like a neo-romantic solstice tinged with jazz.

Perfect: in the attempt to decode them in fifteen lines I think I've named almost all the bands and musical genres I prefer, but I believe White Denim is much more than I can hear, balls included.

Album of the year with no appeal for manifest superiority.