The Donnybrook Writing Academy

Most Likely To: be the year’s most overlooked EP.

As an introduction to their swirled, haunting sound, Exquisite Corpse serves the L.A. area trio Warpaint well. Band members Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman share guitar and vocal duties while Jenny Lee Lindberg plays bass on their debut EP. L.A.’s Manimal Record’s released Exquisite Corpse, and while it is much too easy to be suspicious of a label whose founder worked in fashion and whose raison d’être had been to release Madonna tribute records, the EP’s six songs prove that Warpaint are not just three pretty faces killing time until their film careers ignite. Their music is so good they don’t even need to act.

Imagine that Chan Marshall had taken a left turn at What Would the Community Think and kept making rocking songs in the vein of “Nude Like the News” rather than finding herself swept up in the barefoot sobriety of her own good intentions and you have Warpaint’s “Billie Holiday.” Warpaint’s siren song draws not only on Marshall, but on the introspective prog-rock of Mary Timony, and like Timony, the women of Warpaint are at their best when they follow wherever their meandering melodies lead them, as on “Stars” and “Burgundy.” In contrast, the taut post punk of “Krimson” and the vocal dynamics of “Elephant” help vary the tempo and the tone of the EP.

But it’s on the stellar “Beetles” that Warpaint show they are capable of anything. This outlier of a song has it all: rhythms that bob and weave through shimmery minor chord melody and feel-bad lyrics, “I want to throw it out the window / Let’s get naked and rip down the wall that makes me crazy.” And that’s just in the first half of the song. The latter half hovers around the song’s dark and dreamy core, which forms the backdrop for the lyrical plea, “I want someone to hold my hand and give me lessons/ because I want to melt the night.”

T.S. Eliot may have deemed that April was the cruelest month, but I think there’s a good argument to be made for November. With its sleet-filled days and it’s dark and chilly evenings, the eleventh month is often the bleakest, if not the cruelest. Thanks be to Warpaint for releasing Exquisite Corpse during October, so it will be ready when we need it the most. I imagine my one sweater clad arm emerging from under a sea of covers to adjust the iPod without having to uncover my head. Because Exquisite Corpse is music for days when it is so cold. So very cold.

Listen to “Billie Holiday” from Warpaint:

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