White Denim seems intent on robbing me of my good faith. I’ve held on so long, hoping for the greatness I know they’re capable of.
I don’t want to believe that they’ve become just another Black Keys copy, another band that took all of their blues cues from the White Stripes and tore out all the heart and punk. Their first EP, Let’s Talk About It, is a masterpiece of inspired deconstructionist rock’n’roll. Their last album, Corsicana Lemonade, skirted that same ethos with “At Night in Dreams,” but the rest of that album is so derivative of the Black Keys that I genuinely can’t distinguish James Petralli’s vocals from those of Dan Auerbach, and Dan Auerbach is the Billy Joel of modern rock, i.e., I respect his work, but you’d sooner find me with a cactus up my ass than buying one of his records.
I can understand why it would seem ridiculous for me to be so harsh. White Denim’s recent albums aren’t bad, not in a Paris Hilton way or an Insane Clown Posse way. It’s just that they used to be so much more.
Back in 2007, they were like a modern Jethro Tull, if Jethro Tull threw out the flute and pulled up their big girl panties and played some up front and in your face NOISE. They were like Led Zeppelin with less finesse and a frontman with a Glenn Danzig growl. Sometimes they were fun garage rock, but other times they were raucous hard rock, the hardest you could get from a band formed after the year 2000. Their bassist wasn’t just a useless piece of rhythm machinery to fill up the background — the basslines were actual music, and were just as important as the guitar parts and those searing vocals. Their songs didn’t really have verses or choruses; instead, they would move from one guitar riff to the next haphazardly and suddenly. Their songs had miniature movements. White Denim used to offer something that you couldn’t find anywhere else. Now, they offer something you can find everywhere else.
Their newest album, Stiff, is icing on the diarrhea cake that is every album the band has released since 2009's Fits.
Let’s get it out of the way: Stiff is a perfectly fine rock album. It’s definitely the best of White Denim’s post-awesome era. “Had 2 Know (Personal)” opens with one of the best guitar parts of recent years. “There’s a Brain In My Head” sounds like a Rubber Soul-era Beatles song with an Allman Brothers coat of paint. “Real Deal Momma” even skirts some of the band’s old punky chutzpah, like “At Night In Dreams” did on Corsicana Lemonade. They’ve even fixed the monotony problem that runs rampant on Last Day Of Summer and D — the album has some solid slow jams to break up the constant guitar fuzz and southern rock falsetto. And, thank God, they’ve thrown out the shoegaze drone that they’ve been obsessed with for the past four years.
But none of that excuses the fact that White Denim used to be something worth talking about, and now they’re writing themselves into oblivion. Nobody’s going to want to remember a band who wrote songs like “(I’m The One) Big Big Fun,” an insignificant song with whiny vocals and, for some reason beyond my reckoning, a bongo part. What is a bongo part doing in a White Denim song? It’s wrong, and I won’t stand for it.
How am I supposed to enjoy the James Brown shuffle of “Ha Ha Ha Ha (Yeah)” when the song doesn’t go anywhere? Where’s the turnaround, when does the bottom drop out? Surprise me, damnit! It’s not even a song. It’s a decent first half of a song, maybe. May I remind you, this is a band that used to incorporate three or four guitar guitar structures per song, switching between them with frantic abandon and no regard for formal song structure. I expect better.
How am I supposed to enjoy the Otis Redding sweetness of “Take It Easy (Ever After Lasting Love)” (Okay, what’s the deal with the parentheticals? Calm down, Lester Bangs.) when the guitars don’t even crunch? I know that it’s a slow jam, and I know it does a fantastic job of giving the album space to breathe, but I can’t get the alternative out of my head. I can’t stop thinking of the spastic nonsense this band used to be capable of. Did you guys forget? Do you not remember how fun and groundbreaking and free it was to play songs like “Let’s Talk About It” or “Mess Your Hair Up” or “Radio Milk How Can You Stand It”?
Don’t bore me, White Denim. Don’t let me down. Don’t let me believe that your early work was a just a flash in the pan, the result of the freedom of youth and naïveté. I worry about you. I worry that you, like the Black Keys, like the Walkmen, were ruined by your own attempts to polish your sound. You got serious and it spoiled everything that was special about you in the first place. Listening to your newer records is like reading an especially stale book about the history of blues. Don’t be that way. Be more. Be better.
