White Denim - Last Day of Summer [Album Review and Show Preview]
We've always considered White Denim a jam band at heart, and if you've ever seen them live, you probably know what we mean: swirling guitar loops, thumping bass and cannonshot drums all add up to a huge, heavy sound. There's less of that here (actually, there's pretty much none of it), but the technical ability and craftsmanship are so off-the-charts good that you probably won't even care that, at first listen, this hardly sounds like a White Denim record. There are no teeth-rattlers like "Shake Shake Shake" or "Radio Milk", but the trade-off is that this album is, well, catchy. The guitar riffs are clean and upbeat, Steve Terebecki plays his bass with a delicate, melodic touch, and drummer Joshua Block propels the songs forward and fills them out wonderfully. Petralli's weary tenor is a bigger part of the sound, too - the vocal work on "Home Together," to name just one example, carries the song just as much as the rolling drumbeat and three-note piano riff.
Last Day of Summer kicks off with a re-recording of "I'd Have It Just the Way Were," which first showed up on last year's Fits. It maintains the same jazzy, staccato feel, with an added layer of haziness to the vocals, which float over the song like clouds. "If You're Changing" is a gorgeous, Byrds-inflected slow jam that eventually breaks into a casual strut, while "Champ" stomps in with a muted, bouncy bassline and some rapid fire vocals that bleed into another pretty chorus, which gets topped with a bit of Wurlitzer (courtesy of Brazos' Martin Crane.)
Elsewhere, there are two jazzy instrumentals back-to-back: "Incaviglia" sounds like the theme song to a Hawaiian caper flick, while "Light Light Light" is driven along by a thwacking bass line and some dissonant sax. "Shy Billy" has an R&B feel, and the wistful, introspective "New Coat" ends the record with another catchy summer jam.
The album highlight, though, is "Tony Fatti". It jumps in with a shifty guitar line before bursting into a twitchy, positively-danceable chorus. "I don't wanna be so careful, I don't wanna hold your hand," Petralli sings - "I just wanna give you a trip to remember, 'cause you know I can," which is as good a description of this record as any.
This review is full of adjectives not normally associated with White Denim, but Last Day of Summer stands just as tall as Exposion and Fits. It's not an either/or thing with these guys - they have the skill to weld their many diverse influences together. That they explore new sounds so successfully here augurs well for their continued growth on future records. That being said, White Denim is a band best experienced live, which experience you can have on Saturday night at Antone's. Tickets are only $10, and there will be a limited number of hand packaged CD copies of Last Day of Summer at the show. Local synth-rock foursome Woodgrain opens.
