SPOTIFY REVIEW: Warpaint "Warpaint" (Rough Trade)

             In September of 2012, I moved from Texas back to Connecticut after an eight year run in the Lone Star State.   It was a hard time for me, for a number of reasons I don’t really feel necessary to get into here, but at the end of 2012 I had listened to two new to me bands that I knew were going to be staples in my life from that point forward. 

            Somehow, despite not liking a number of other bands I was hearing for the first time, Warpaint became an instant classic, a new favorite and a staple of my life when I first heard “The Fool”.   2013 was The Year of Music, but I still carried “The Fool” with me through that year, recognizing something I should have heard back in 2010 but was preoccupied with I don’t remember what.

            If I could turn back time (Cher) I would have named The Album of the Year for 2009 “Fantasies” by Metric.   Likewise, my Album of the Year for 2010 is undoubtedly “The Fool”.   There was never any thought or concern in my mind when this came out of, “What if it’s not good?” and I’d like to talk about that fact for a minute.

            When I was a teenager, I bought CDs blindly.  I would hear one song on the radio or see the video on Mtv and think, “That’s cool, I bet the rest of their songs are just as good!”  It lead to me owning such unfortunate music choices as that one CD Crash Test Dummies did that everyone knew the song for and the one later too when he sang in a higher voice.

            Many of the changes that have taken place since 2000 in physical releases of music really have been formulating since music first became recorded.    People not willing to pay $15 for one song they like for that particular moment and will most likely be a passing phase alongside ten or eleven other songs that are not quite up to par is nothing new. 

            Thinking of classic albums by bands like The Beatles up to Nirvana, it’s really hard to believe we ever lived in a time when those albums came out and as soon as we heard them we thought “Instant classic” and it was true because, well, people do tend to overuse that word.   But I bet all of those kids who bought “Nevermind” because they liked the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” knew the moment they let the whole album play that it was going to have a huge impact.

            So really, not only is it a feat to have this be recognizable so quickly, but it is even harder to simply find an album these days that is just good song-for-song.  And I knew, in my mind, that this would deliver when I heard it.  And it did.  

            This is how music should be.  If every album was like this, music would be the billion dollar industry that it really should be, where people pay ten dollars for a single song because it’s worth it.   Give Warpaint whatever they ask of you.   However much they want you to pay for these tiny pieces of their souls is simply not enough, so relish in the delight that you are getting such a great deal.