Music: White Denim
From the home of alt-rock in Austin, Texas, come this brilliant four-piece
One of the most exciting indie rock bands of recent years, White Denim’s melange of psychedelic rock, blues, punk rock, soul, jazz and progressive rock, combined with their experimental approach and fondness for home-based recording, has seen them become more than just a cult success.
Singer-songwriter and guitarist James Petralli has said of their 2013 album, Corsicana Lemonade, “It’s a barbeque record, essentially”, full of summery grooves married with a country-funk/boogie-soul, bent classic ’70s pop and rock, and riff-heavy. Still frenetic, still chugging along at a swift pace, White Denim have however found a new ease within their grooves, and in turn have found new audiences with this more accessible sound.
In making a record closer to their live experience, Petralli concedes that the band’s aim was to pull back from the complex song structures that took their cues from prog and jazz: “Initially, we did start by recording a bunch of rockist numbers, but we got kind of fatigued with it.”
With that in mind, the band took up a longstanding invitation to record with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, following their tour together in early 2012. “We just tried out every instrument we could get our hands on and laid out these kind of krautrock vamps. That studio is basically a museum; they have pretty much any instrument you could think of, so we just threw everything at it. The spirit was to not have any studio fixing. When I listen to the new record now, it sounds like us learning to play that music, which is cool. To capture that freshness and that uncertain certainty.”
The Chicago experience galvanised the four’s initial determination to make a different kind of White Denim record, and it took them just two months. They went back to Austin, outfitted a rented house as a studio and with local producer and ‘tone guru’ Jim Vollentine’s array of vintage radio broadcast gear, the resulting sound was warm and intimate. “He’s been salvaging from yard sales for the past 20 years,” Petralli reveals. “We had a pretty nice mixture of ’70s hi-fi equipment and really early tube equipment from the ’40s and ’50s.”
As well as a change in sound and process, the arrival of a baby in Petralli’s life brought inspiration. “We decided that we wanted to talk about relationships and family. Plus, we’d all been listening to a lot of the country music and pop we’d grown up with – stuff like Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt.”
While they may have veered towards the path marked ‘mainstream’ with this new album, White Denim remain a truly spirited and exciting proposition. They are one of the finest guitar-based bands of recent years.
Concorde 2, Tuesday 27 May, 7.30pm, £16
