There’s a quite brilliant symmetry
to Los Angeles septet The Warlocks. Or at least there is once pretty, slight keyboard/tambourinist/left-flank
Laura Grigsby takes up her position minutes after the other 6 members shuffle
into place, looking apologetically unbalanced. Laura and bassist Jennifer Fraser
cover the stage’s far sides, in front and inside of them the two pronged guitar
cavalry of Corey Granet and John Rees, behind them the double drum set-up of Jason
Anchondo and Robert Mustachio (left and right-handed beaters, respectively), and
out at the foremost pin-point leads none-more-black frontman Bobby Hecksher. They
are, physically speaking, a psychedelic-drone heptagon, which is an effective
enough allegory for the songs they create also. This gig is an invite only
preview for their excellent forthcoming third album ‘Surgery’. There’s an unfussy
intimacy to the room, an air of understated expectation hugging those gathered,
Bobby Gillespie is spotted in the vicinity of the bar, wiggling his backside with
a damn sight less vengeance than its main stage appearance at Glastonbury, and
there’s a reason for that. Inhabiting similar dusty dosed-up domains to the infinitely
more infamous Dandy Warhols, BRMC and Brian Jonestown Massacre, they’re like the
elixir that has yet to be tapped, they feel a bit secret, hazy, exclusive and
appropriately potent. They’re a beguiling spectacle for something built
so straightforwardly from the ground up. The two drummers add no real injection
of innovation, they are muscle, but far from fully flexed. They play, as far as
we can tell, identically. Their duty seems entirely hypnotic, and that it is.
One of the guitarists (the one on the right, if that helps) is a peculiar bonsai
Toni Iommi who plays his axe under his left armpit, like an affliction. Jennifer
is a space rock cliché, gyrating as though intoxicated in a private retro cosmos.
And frontman Bobby hides behind his jet black fringe and whatever distortion his
guitar can muster, his timid, shell-shocked demeanour and stark fragility of voice
often recalling the late Elliot Smith. The new songs, like those on predecessors
‘Phoenix’ and ‘Rise & Fall’, blossom out of repetitive guitar lines, tight, regimented
rhythms, breakaway fuzz melodies and craggy displaced vocals. ‘Thursday’s Radiation’
rotates intensely like a heavy, distorted kaleidoscope, subscribing to every existing
expectation and maybe excelling a couple, ditto ‘Suicide Note’. But it’s songs
like ‘It’s Just Like Surgery’ and ‘Evil Eyes Again’, with a certain 50’s pop magnetism
added to the shady brew, that feel like they’ll eventually lodge as favourites,
like ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Hurricane Heart Attack’ already are tonight. There is a
difference in that there’s a brighter hue to them on this trip, to a degree, but
the formula remains on call and old and new fit together happily like Jack Daniels
and coke in an LA dressing room cliché. Relevant sites:
http://www.thewarlocks.com/
James Berry for Crud Magazine 2005©
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| 04/05 British Sea Power - Live - Scala, London
04/05 Eels - Live - Royal Festival Hall, London
04/05 Doves, Elbow, Longview - Carling 24 , Manchester
04/05 Joy Zipper, ICA London
04/05 The National - 100 Club, London
04/05 Redjetson / Liberez / Twentysixfeet - Marquee, London
04/05 The Warlocks - Bethnal Green Working Men's Club
12/04 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - ULU, London
12/04 Elbow - Live -Brixton Academy, London
12/04 Franz Ferdinand - Live - Alexandra Palace, London
12/04 Morning Runner - Kings College London
12/04 Carling Weekend Reading Festival 2005
12/04 Sigur Rós - Brixton Academy, London
12/04 Crud Top 20 Albums 2005 |  |
January 2001
July - August 2001
September - October 2001
November - December 2001
January - March 2002
April - July 2002
August - December 2002
January - March 2003
May - August 2003
November 2003
January - March 2004
April - September 2004
October - December 2004
January - March 2005
April - December 2005
January - August 2006
September - December 2006
January - September 2007
October - December 2007
January - May 2008
June-December 2008
| | |
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