Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 23/06/08
Label: Full Time Hobby

Such is the aura surrounding Texan music industry love-in South By Southwest these days that it seems you just have to be resident in Austin to start building a buzz. Form a band and the din is deafening. Easy work then for James Petralli, Joshua Block and Steve Terebecki, whose UK debut, which compiles the tracks from their first two US EPs, is already the toast of a hundred blogs. Happily, their curiously structured take on chaotic garage rock will continue to excite long after the circus has left town. Because "Workout Holiday" is an engrossingly dense record that unpeels its layers over several listens.

At first it's all raw energy: single "Let's Talk About It" careens around the room, blind drunk on the thrill of four chords. Listen again and you hear the way that even this most primal boogie has been deconstructed, its elements stripped away in the mix, guitars stretched into distortion, thrashing about off the beat as the bass line plunges and percussion rattles. This is rock music reconfigured through the production lens of dub and techno. A minute into "Mess Your Hair Up" the bass is dropped out to a distant rumble as the song works back up through a call and response guitar mantra and a pregnant pause before thundering back into life.

It's thrilling to hear raw rock music with such an acute understanding of production dynamics, constantly falling apart to come back together with sweet resolution. None of this would mean a thing, of course, if they didn't have the tunes to back up the ideas. But "Heart From Us All" has all the posture of Lou Reed with the pop nous of T Rex, "Sitting" gives a Beatleseque melody a drunken kick around and throughout tracks like "All You Really Have To Do" and "Don't Look That Way At It" fragments of brilliant melody surface amongst the rumbling dub garage like great ideas bubbling to the surface.

Superficially then, White Denim might, on first listen, ape the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion but unlike garage revivalists like The Hives - whose studied revivalism has all the innovative spirit of a 19th century theme park - they've kicked all the best things about red-blooded rock into exciting new shapes. Aside from a slightly indulgent wade through the production boards on "Look That Way At It", this is an album that never allows your attention to slip for a minute. Who'd have thought this music would still have so much to teach us in 2008?

    by James Poletti