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White Denim
Workout Holiday



Texan mentalists' spazz-rock debut.

White Denim

If White Denim's 2008 Let's Talk About It EP - all spastic guitars, barked vocals and random synth burbles - suggested a gloriously hyperactive Pere Ubu, then the Texan trio's first LP proper implied they were of the opinion that if you can mine one genre, why not mine fifteen? From Nuggets-era garage rock (Shake Shake Shake), jaunty piano-pop (Sitting), and jigsaw puzzle math-rock (Don't Look That Way At It), everything and anything is tackled with frenzied aplomb, often in the space of a single verse. Songs on Workout Holiday don't so much progress as they do suddenly transform themselves beyond all recognition; for instance, listening to WDA is like sitting in the middle of a centrifuge as Sonic Youth's Teenage Riot is spun out into disembodied fragments before realigning itself as Spiral Scratch-era Buzzcocks. However, rather than sounding like an incoherent, overly ambitious mess, White Denim's schizophrenic tendencies are reigned in by muscular musicianship (drummer Josh Block is a trained jazz percussionist, fact fans) and a charmingly lo-fi sound quality, the result - presumably - of being recorded in a disused trailer. Their more house-trained follow-up, Fits, emerges later this month.

Chris Catchpole

Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 10/06/2009


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