Review Summary: form?
War Bodies's opener "I'm a Dog" ambles in on a electronic buzz that mutates into a punk progression that feels so patentedly SST, you may think a lost Saccharine Trust tune is coming on. Then Olivia Gibb gives a sooty triple yelp and the whole thing comes apart in a fit of sonic chaos. That's how Warm Bodies announce themselves on their debut LP, and they do it all in under thirty seconds. It only gets headier and more demented from there.
Warm Bodies moves in drunken swarm formations, the songs sliding out of garage scuzz into raw noise and then snapping off spiny neurotic solos. Most every sub-genre that splintered off rock n' roll from the 60's on gets a schizoid little nod here. "My Face Fell Off" somehow packs Southern rock swing into a surf pattern that itself gets deformed utterly, made into a minute-long stretch of crank-case contortions. The twitchy tension of "Something Weird is Eating Me" lands somewhere between Captain Beefheart and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. And "Psychic Connection" is just plain gorgeous, kicking off on a burst of rubber-fingered fret abuse that abruptly breaks into a riff so infectiously rowdy, it lurches down the neck and straight for the knees. Guitarist Ian Teeple is a small wonder, showing all the cool rock sinisterisms of Mick Collins blended with Glenn Branca's dissonant tics circa Theoretical Girls. Bar for bar, he embodies the hectic howl of garage punk far better and more earnestly than the genre's old established revivalist honchos (your Jack Whites, your Ty Segalls and whatever moniker tweaking the Thee Oh Sees are going through nowadays).
It is Olivia Gibb, Warm Bodies' lead who becomes the album however. She makes
Warm Bodies' already-crazed pathos feel dizzyingly hot-blooded, shrieking, moaning and chanting her way through one giddy fuzz-f
uckball after another. All ill-conceived and hasty 'next rock saviour' slinging aside, there hasn't been a singer in recent memory, regardless of gender or genre, who embodied aesthetic mania this effortlessly. Gibb sounds so unhinged and reckless while describing a strange growth on her body on "Something Weird" that her high-pitched chorus of 'Itchy, itchy, itchy!!' sends a phantom prickle across the body. She doesn't let up for any of
Warm Bodies' frenetic half-hour run, growing impossibly more vexed and madcap with every track.
Warm Bodies sags ever so slightly after the dubby synth freakout of "Stinky dUMBOMix," but recovers nicely and manages to stick the landing with a two-punch closer in the caterwauling "I Need a Doctor" and "I Smashed It." Still, the band will likely have to splice something more than untamed rock deconstructionisms into their sound in order to move up the food-chain or elevate themselves past the best small-club live show you'll catch all year. For now, it's damn exciting to take them for what they are - a hungry band unafraid to self-immolate and underground's unlikeliest rescuers.
