A top producer’s attention was on the line Tuesday night during a performance by the Los Angeles-based rock band Warpaint. Their set, at Webster Hall in New York, brought out Brian Burton, the musician and producer best known as Danger Mouse, who visited backstage after the show.
“I came to check it out,” he told Glide. “I’ve seen them play a couple times.” While Danger Mouse declined to elaborate, his midnight meeting with Warpaint’s manager signaled more than a passing interest in the 10-year-old quartet. The original lineup formed in 2004, the year Danger Mouse emerged with his underground Beatles/Jay Z-mashup classic, The Grey Album. Most recently, he produced U2’s polarizing surprise release, Songs of Innocence.
Did Warpaint win Danger Mouse over? It wasn’t immediately clear. But they performed with a seasoned tightness to a full house in near darkness, staying faithful to the ferocious sonics of their studio recordings. (Flood, who also worked on the new U2, produced Warpaint’s self-titled album, released in January.)
Onstage, the four women of Warpaint pushed each other in pairs; notably, the rhythm section, comprised of bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg and drummer Stella Mozgawa, spent much of the show thrusting in unison. Guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman traded vocal duty, with Wayman banging out crunchy electronic beats between turns. “We are really diplomatic,” Kokal told Glide in a brief interview. “We work together as a unit. So we kind of shape songs—no matter who’s singing—together.”
Wayman and Kokal share a similar tone. One voice enriches the other as they intertwine, creating eerie, psychedelic lullabies like “Love Is To Die,” on which Wayman sings lead. “I never really considered myself a singer,” she admitted backstage. “So I’ve realized I need to figure out what that means for me, really. I love it, so I somehow set up a situation where I do the thing I love to do.”
Shrieking guitars and a heavy, sneaking backbeat slowly swallow the room in a bittersweet trance. Then, like a lurch from sleep, Mozgawa smacks her sticks against the snare’s rim and her arms go blurry, ricocheting from hi-hat to floor tom on “Disco//very,” which sounds something like a confrontation between Blondie and Mazzy Star.
To close the night, Warpaint opened its jam-driven encore with “Biggy,” a title that underscores the set’s creeping expansion. And they played all the mightier at the end, stampeding through “Elephants,” from 2008’s Exquisite Corpse, with Lindberg and Mozgawa locking eyes and losing themselves in Black Sabbath territory, well after their two singers had taken off their guitars.
