Warpaint played much of its full-length debut at the Paradise.
(Kayana Szymczak for The Boston Globe)
MUSIC REVIEW
Warpaint delivers hypnotic haze
Warpaint played much of its full-length debut at the Paradise.
(Kayana Szymczak for The Boston Globe)
Letter by letter, they spelled out the words “Billie Holiday’’ until they didn’t register anymore, the sort of sing-songy chant you might hear on a playground. The letters, glazed in reverb and sung in unison, slurred into one another over the slack strum of guitar. Out of nowhere, the song suddenly cribbed lyrics from a girl-group anthem from the 1960s, Mary Wells’s “My Guy’’: “Nothing you can say/ Can tear me away/ From my guy/ Nothing you can do/ ‘Cause I’m stuck like glue/ To my guy.’’
The song in question was called “Billie Holiday,’’ and it encapsulated the hypnotic powers of the band singing it at the Paradise on Tuesday night. Warpaint is essentially a modern girl group, but one that lingers in a haze of ’60s psychedelia and ’80s shoegaze. The Shangri-Las on Quaaludes, if you will.
Formed in Los Angeles in 2004, Warpaint is anchored by childhood friends Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, the group’s guitarists and main singers who routinely swap lead duties and inhabit opposite ends of ethereal. At the Paradise, Kokal tended to wail like a wounded animal, contorting her notes into shards that pierced Wayman’s more terrestrial backing vocals.
Playing most of its recent full-length debut, “The Fool,’’ the quartet savored its songs’ knotty interludes, often letting the music emanate ambience more than emote anything concrete. Jenny Lee Lindberg’s thick, murky bass lines signaled the familiar opening strains of “Undertow,’’ Warpaint’s best-known song, which goaded an audience that had otherwise been locked in reverence.
But the band seemed most comfortable when the music shifted shapes. When “Undertow’’ cracked into a sprawling instrumental, drummer Stella Mozgawa’s mallets went flying up and down, effectively giving the crowd permission to dance.
On “Shadows,’’ it was tough to tell if the sullen refrain was a lament or a mission statement for a band so at home on the fringe: “I feel like the shadows/ I don’t even bother for any more than that.’’
James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com. 
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
