Gang Of War

From Hollywood’s underbelly charge Warpaint, rejuvenators of psych-rock. JJ Dunning Finds four girls on a mission..

Men. They’re bloody everywhere, aren’t they? Whether they’re building giant bonfires of Qur’ans, calling the Chinese subhuman, or invading Iraq in tanks, they’re an omniscient, truculent, force of nature. Even in the world of indie music – a utopian meadow of equality, supposedly, where the bigots and the sexists get knuckleheaded and wedgied – men are still the overriding majority. Like it or not, indie rock is a sausage fest. It’s especially rare, then, to encounter a band of girls – yes, GIRLS! – whose debut album is marbled with traits of overtly masculine music. They even admit to liking Yes, for fuck’s sake. It might be thirty years overdue, but in Los Angelean four-piece Warpaint, psych-rock has finally gotten in touch with its feminine side…

Sitting in a pub in a Maida Vale backstreet, Emily Kokal, Theresa Wayman, Jenny Lee Lindberg and Stella Mozgawa don’t look like the hessian-poncho-wearing acid casualties we were expecting. They’re too on the ball to begin with – no long, awkward “yeah man…” pauses, no vague meandering discourses on the origins of the universe, – instead they talk over each other and at once, making it quite tough to keep up with conversation, but very easy to see the energy they share as a gang. “The first practice we had, we just got stoned and played guitar for hours,” says bassist Lindberg, a picture of punk with an all-over buzz-cut, save for a long, lank, fringe. “There was a moment were we just thought, wow, this is the music I wanna hear. It was what we were all instinctively, intuitively, feeling with each other.” But, despite the immediate surge of positivity from this first practice, things have moved relatively slowly. In fact, it’s taken Warpaint six years to curve around to writing and recording their debut album, with only last year’s ‘Exquisite Corpse’ EP offered up by way of a taster. Kokal explains, “We haven’t really been an active band for all that time. It’s not like we were playing every day for six years. It was off and on, you know? We had a heavy rotation of drummers. We only did seven shows – total – in four years.”

The “heavy rotation” of drummers meant that ‘Exquisite Corpse’ saw them use three, including founding member, and Jenny’s sister, Shannyn Sossamon. If the name is familiar, then you may remember her from ‘A Knight’s Tale’ in which she starred alongside Heath Ledger. As it happens, the late great Joker was a big fan – as is Billy Zane – while Justin Timberlake’s blog has rattled excitedly at the mere mention of Kokal and co. Perhaps it stems from Sossamon’s participation in the early days, but celebrity and – to a minor degree, at least – Hollywood have been intertwined with Warpaint from the very beginning. Yet, while some acts are hollow and uninspiring behind the glitzy façade, Warpaint simply haven’t bothered to erect one. They have never piggybacked on their connections. During our encounter, they don’t toss in a single check-me-out anecdote. Name-dropping isn’t their thing. In fact, err, did we mention that ‘Exquisite Corpse’ was produced by Kokal’s boyfriend-at-the-time, the erstwhile Red Hot Chili Pepper Mr. John Frusciante? No? Whoops. Oh well; that’s just the way Warpaint roll. In fact, it’s a testament to their talents that these pseudo-celebrity entanglements have not whipped up any significant cynicism. We’re certain that had they been English and so irrevocably linked with such  A-list connections, Warpaint’s music would have been received with a large dollop of skepticism. Theresa – also an actress, one who’ll you’ll recognize if you’ve seen that nauseating wrist-slit scene in The Rules Of Attraction – is perplexed. “I get thrown off because there is big celebrity culture in the Europe and especially London – I know it’s not the same as LA – but to me it’s like the celebrity culture is just the same here. So I don’t get why people don’t understand that you see these people – actors, celebrities, whatever – when you go to the café, or if they’re a friend of a friend, and you’re also an artist. It’s natural. You don’t freak out at the fact that you’re seeing a famous person.”

“Hanging out with all those people in LA means nothing to us,” asserts Emily. “We’re not fazed by it. They’re our friends and they’re all very down-to-earth people. Very laid back.” And it’s kind of obvious when you think about it like that. In LA, if Warpaint see someone famous in a bar, it’ll quite likely be someone of international renown. If Egyptian Hip- Hop nip down the pub, the best they can probably hope for is to bump into Les Battersby. Hollywood is global, Granada Television is not. With Sossamon departed to concentrate on her acting, the band became reinvigorated by the addition of new drummer Stella Mozgawa early last year. As Emily puts it, her introduction marked a re-ignition of the Warpaint “vision”. “It feels solid like it did with Shannyn now that we have Stella,” she says. “We know what we are doing and where we’re going. Stella has helped us get our mojo back. When we first started there was this solidarity, like we were in a gang or something.”

And “gang” is most definitely the word. Perhaps it’s their backgrounds – 50% of the band grew up in what they describe as “hippy communes” – but Warpaint’s company feels exclusively autonomous. There’re no power struggles or ego clashes here. Jenny Lee is insistent; “We all inspire each other to be hands on. No one person takes full control. If one person wants to do it, then everybody probably wants to do it. It’s not even like one of us will go mix the record or one of us will design the t-shirts; usually everyone will be very collaborative about everything.” But surely, we reason, that must lead to conflict? “No,” says Jenny, without hesitation. “If we’re writing a song,” Kokal picks up, “and we’re trying to figure out how to get from this part to the next part, the general rule is that we try every idea. It takes longer, but we’re getting faster at it. The cool thing, I think, is that we always end up thinking that the same idea is the one that feels right. We’ve developed a trust of what the band is. It’s a hive mind, and we all know how to serve the songs. If everybody is in agreement, then that’s serving the song already.” The fruit of this agreeably communal labour is their excellent debut album ‘The Fool’. At times shadowy and gothic like early Cure, at others intent on Dead Meadow-sized sprawl, its excellence resides in the fact that it’s not just atmosphere for atmosphere’s sake. There are intensely clever melodies and harmonies skittered across the haze. “Everything we do is just coming from feeling,” Theresa explains. “There’s never been one type of music that we’ve listened to and thought ‘Oh, it sounds like that!’. Maybe in one or two albums, it will.” From the gutty opening pulses of ‘Set Your Arms Down’, through the dangerously catchy ‘Undertow’ and the pseudo-Yeasayer chants of ‘Composure’, Warpaint have constructed an album of artful poise, without disappearing up their own front bottoms. But what is perhaps their biggest achievement is that ‘The Fool’ doesn’t sound like a one-off record. It sounds like the beginning of something special.

“That’s exactly how we feel,” Jenny Lee agrees, before shedding light on where they might venture next. “We actually have done a range of things when we’ve been practicing and just jamming out, really pretty, folky stuff too, but then we’re all really into electronic music and so it all gets pretty dark.” “I like the idea of infusing a lot of different influences,” says Mozgawa, “maybe not spreading one idea across a whole album, but using elements of electronic music, or folk music – whatever aesthetic we are attracted to – within a single song.”

Whatever they choose to do next, we need Warpaint around. So far, like a psych-rock rocket from the guts of Hollywood, they’ve rejuvenated a genre last seen knocking about in the company of balding old men. Who knows what else they can do?

‘The Fool’ is released on Rough Trade on October 25th.