A trio who have not only played Austin's SXSW festival but actually hail from the town, White Denim were greeted with the fawning you would expect when they broke through last year. Because they specialise in the kind of psychedelic/garage mish-mash that excites hipsters rather than record buyers, their two albums haven't disturbed the charts, but they managed to fill Heaven for this end-of-tour show.
Freewheeling stoners, they refused to heed the usual convention of making songs sound roughly similar to their recorded versions. What they did instead was play two clumps of music that lasted exactly 20 minutes each (plus 10-minute encore), sandwiching 14 songs together with only the briefest break halfway through. They deserve top marks for stamina, if nothing else, particularly drummer Josh Block, who often stood up to pound out his vicious beats.
Though the seamless, jamming-style approach made it an achievement to recognise individual tunes, there was ample variety within each 20-minute cluster. They started with the straightforward Texas boogie of Don't Look That Way at It, moved on to All You Really Have to Do's muggy-headed psychedelia and pressed ahead with the space-jazz of Mirrored and Reverse. It was ramshackle and messy, yet the threesome were effortlessly in step with each other, suggesting that they're better musicians than they let on.
Singer/guitarist James Petralli often bypassed language altogether and simply howled: "Ug! Uh! Waaaah!" It conveyed his meaning as well as anything. As Let's Talk About It ended the set, Block banged a cowbell until he looked bored – a fitting conclusion to a set that was by turns fascinating and tedious.
