The third all-female buzz band to play the Black Cat in the past month (with Vivian Girls still to come this week), Warpaint may lack the sheer power and pedigree of Wild Flag and the stylish retro charms of Dum Dum Girls. But on Saturday night, the L.A.-based quartet proved equally capable of enthralling a capacity crowd, delivering a confident 75-minute performance that put their artful, yet accessible post-punk sound on impressive display.
On the heels of strong opening sets by Brooklyn-based noise-folk four-piece Family Band and Australian electro-math trio PVT, Warpaint took the stage amidst a haze of fog-machine vapors, kicking off their performance with “Set Your Arms Down,” the moody opening track to their 2010 full-length debut, The Fool. After switching instruments with guitarist/vocalist Theresa Wayman during the first song, drummer Stella Mozgawa got back behind the kit, anchoring the hypnotic art-rocker “Bees” and laying down an urgent cadence that had Emily Kokal grooving as she cut loose on the mantra-like vocals of “Composure.”
By the time the band unleashed its strident, eponymous “Warpaint,” the crowd had worked itself up to a fever pitch, finally getting a chance to catch its breath during “Billie Holiday,” a slow, haunting track from Warpaint’s 2009 EP, Exquisite Corpse. Bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg did her best vocal impression of Chan Marshall, melodically spelling out the name of the titular jazz legend before liltingly appropriating words from Mary Wells’ Motown classic, “My Guy.”
Following that respite, the group ramped back up to full intensity during a lengthy version of “Elephants,” Wayman’s delicate guitar lines gradually giving way to a robust, crunchy groove as the song built towards an extended psychedelic instrumental jam. The funk-inflected coda of “Majesty” capped off the main set, after which Warpaint returned for a two-song encore that featured a dazzling rendition of “Beetles,” arguably the show’s best number. Mozgawa and Lindberg deftly guided the band through a series of dynamic tempo shifts and Kokal coaxed cascades of reverb-drenched melodies from her Fender Jaguar while Wayman declaimed the song’s harrowed lyrics (“I am not prepared / I just gotta gotta get there / Where am I, why can’t I just get it together? / Fuck it, where’s my shit? / Oh my god, I’m mad at it”). It was a stirring conclusion to a tight, synergistic performance marred only by some apparent monitor problems that seemed to occasionally knock the vocal harmonies a bit out of sync. Warpaint are probably not “The Best Live Band You’ll See All Year” (as NME once claimed with characteristic hyperbole), but more than a few fans likely left the Black Cat on Saturday night begging to differ.
