Some of the most rewarding music is made for drifting. Ambient, most obviously, and pastoral folk and psychedelia all operate with half-lidded eyes, gaze turned inward. Although the verse-chorus-verse Pooters might take issue here, there is nothing wrong with drift.
Warpaint drift, but their drifting doesn't transport you anywhere too noteworthy on their second, self-titled album. Even avant-garde music that thumbs its nose at structure should have a sense of inexorability to it; that you end up transformed, somewhere different from where you started, even having meandered there.Since their first EP, "Exquisite Corpses", this promising LA four-piece have made hazy, intuitive, circular groove-music, mostly with guitars, but now with increasing electronic flourishes. As with Haim, excitement has met Warpaint's blend of talent, musicianship and chromosomes; since their debut, The Fool, they've turned into a sizable draw and start 2014 with one the year's most anticipated albums.
They are, crudely, the anti-Haim: impressionistic and nuanced, where Haim are primary-hued; in touch with the ineffable, where Haim are stooges to cheesy forms like soft rock. Warpaint flow, and privilege instinct over craft: noble traits, especially in the hands of Brian Eno or the Knife. But those traits are deployed largely unsuccessfully here.
Everything Warpaint do sounds enticing – at first. For little shy of two minutes, Intro sounds like the gateway to something charged and enchanted, even if that start is false (they've kept in the bit where drummer Stella Mozgawa makes a mistake). Why not develop it into an actual track? Actually, Mozgawa is one of the best things about this album: restless, present, a welcome point of contact in the will o' the wisp formlessness.
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Succinctly titled, Hi is a high point: vocals, bass, drums and atmospheres all pulling in the same direction, a sort of 21st-century trip hop that begins to approach the "dark sensuality" that Mozgawa has talked of the band aspiring to. There are other fleeting epiphanies, as when Emily Kokal's vocal on Keep It Healthy wanders from the California desert into the Middle East. Several listens in, Go In finally clicks: it is properly trippy and unsettling. Disco//Very finally pummels you, all pulse and attitude. "We'll kill you," chant Warpaint. (Finally, some actual war, after all those watercolour paints.) But no blood is spilt. Warpaint circle their prey, then, having found a cowbell, wander off.
Too much of this music is just hip, well-connected (you can Google their amorous partners, current and former) aural wallpaper, gossamer and murky by turns, undoubtedly very pleasant in an altered state but frustratingly unmemorable. It is surely the height of crassness to demand where the tunes are, but Warpaint did write them, once: Undertow was the killer from The Fool. Baby meant something, while Billie Holiday toyed with form (interpolating some of Smokey Robinson's My Guy) while remaining focused.
When an actual song – as opposed to a "track" – turns up at the very end of the album, it's a feather that knocks you over. Opening with piano, Son finds Theresa Wayman's vocal high in the mix; the music uncluttered, the last 45 seconds an elegant and cogent coda. Love is to Die went online in October, the notional bait-track; on it, Jenny Lee Lindberg's bobbling bassline plays off against Wayman's vocals. But by the time Wayman finally sings the chorus – "Love is to die/ Love is to not die/ Love is to dance" – you really just want Warpaint to stop vacillating and make their minds up, one way or another.
