GroovyStylie!

White Denim (Austin, TX), Brazos (Austin, TX) @ Club Congress

by Charlie Bertsch

If ever there were an album begging for elucidation in a live setting, it’s White Denim’s latest offering Fits. Although many of the tracks are immediately compelling on an individual basis, the record is difficult to comprehend as a whole. Even after listening to it for several hours on auto-repeat, as I putter about the house, I still find myself forgetting what band I’m listening to at several junctures.

White Denim

It’s a real struggle to discern the tie that binds songs like “I Start To Run,” which has the quirky bounce of a Primus number, “Sex Prayer”, which sounds like Tortoise covering Ege Bamyasi-era Can, and Paint Yourself,” one of the best M. Ward songs you’ll never hear on an M. Ward album. Not to mention that the one thing Fits does manage to pull off consistently is a rejection of the gritty garage sound that made its earlier work on the much-praised Workout Holiday leap out of the speakers.

As I waited for the band’s Club Congress show to commence, still soothed by the impressively cohesive sound of opening act Brazos, I kept thinking of a clever old saw: “If you don’t stand for something, you’re going to fall for anything.” In going for a more polished feel on Fits without coming up with a unifying style or concept, White Denim seemed to have lost touch with the attitude that made them so compelling in the first place. Or so I mused as I stood on the wrong side of the net that the venue uses to separate drinkers from underage concert-goers, holding two bottles of beer. The fact that the band spent an inordinate amount of time doing a sound check wasn’t helping my mood, either.

But then the band started to play in earnest and all – except Club Congress, as I’ll explain below – was forgiven. While I wouldn’t say that White Denim reverted to their pre-Fits sound, exactly, the references to Nuggets-era psychedelia suppressed on the new offering were restored to prominence, albeit alongside the more varied repertoire evinced in their new songs. After a time, I developed the impression that the concert was a kind of palimpsest, with the Fits material overlaid – sometimes literally – on top of a more Monterey Pop-friendly base.

White Denim

Unlike most bands, White Denim treats its recorded material, not as songs to be reproduced more or less as-is in a live setting, but as routines that can be recontextualized in a variety of ways. The trio’s extraordinary facility for playing difficult music fast and in a way that exudes the fun of improvisation makes this unorthodox approach work. Some of the suite-like songs on Fits – which are almost as internally disjunctive as the whole album feels – provided spare parts to drop into crowd-pleasing older numbers and some of the riffs off Workout Holiday were snuck in to the Fits material that they played relatively straight.

It was a remarkable achievement, creating a sense of cohesion at a conceptual register. The closest approximation I can recall from the annals of my own show-going past, interestingly, is the Butthole Surfers – like White Denim, a Texas band – who had the power to help listeners perceive the “negative space” in traditional rock songs. White Denim is less trippy, perhaps, but in live performance has more in common with that storied act’s mind-bending approach than with superficially similar current-day bands like Animal Collective.

White Denim

Of course, some of the “praise” for the extreme freedom of White Denim’s performance should probably be directed at Club Congress, which refused to let the late-starting headliners play the set they’d intended. Aside from the “cage” at all-ages shows, there’s nothing more annoying about the way the venue handles live music than its insistence on ending shows early enough to permit a DJ night afterwards. Thankfully, White Denim was clever enough to turn their “last song” into a kind of medley that approached EP length. Still, the bliss instilled by that highlight did not make me forget that I would much rather have seen them play at Plush.

I understand full well that Congress needs to make money. And I love the place too much to stop going, even though I am often disappointed by the experience of being there for anything other than food and drink. But the graceless way in which the purveyors tried to move things along during White Denim’s set, culminating in a dimming of the stage lights, left a really bad taste in my mouth. Can’t the bridge-and-tunnel crowd waiting outside for the DJ night just use the slight delay to adjust hair and make-up or toddle off to the loo for an 80s-style Coke and a smile?

White Denim – ShakeShakeShake MP3

Brazos – Day Glo MP3