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ACL review: Heartless Bastards/White Denim
It would be hard to find two Austin-based, indie-identified bands with more different ways of looking at the way you write, arrange and execute rock music than these two acts, who played back-to-back at the Austin Ventures stage Sunday evening, Heartless Bastards at 5:15 and White Denim at 6:30.
Lead Bastard Erika Wennestrom recently moved here from Ohio, rebooting her band in the process and recording a new recor dwith producer Mike McCarthy (Spoon, Trail of Dead).
While the early comparisons to PJ Harvey seem unfortunate if inevitable, fans seem to have settled into the idea that she won’t be the American PJ we deserve. If anything, her voice is more in the ragged Joplin tradition than Harvey’s artsy howl. The band’s songs are blocky affairs, garage rock in theory but not really in practice. This isn’t spirit of ’66, Beatle boot revivalism, but ruggedly simple rock that didn’t seem to mind that its songs never quite distinguished themselves from one another.
Of course, White Denim’s didn’t either, but they went the other direction entirely. Packed with guitarist James Petralli’s triumphant, quick-change riffs the Austin trio produced high energy grooves that that dissolved into rhythmic vamps, reminding one of nothing so much as a stripped down Mars Volta, such was its complexity and detail. Joshua Block is a mesmerizing drummer, a hard hitting, hard swinging master of the frantic slam and the deft change-up.
You would have had a tough time finding a band that looked happier to be on stage (Petralli’s grin is worthy of a toothpaste ad) or a band that exploded out of the gate so forcefully. I could have watched them stretch those high velocity explorations for another 45 minutes.
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