If you could have two of any element of a band, it’s probably unlikely your eyes would come to rest on the drummer – he’s just a guy who hits stuff and gets insulted but you don’t quite know why, right? Wrong. So, so wrong. If such thoughts ever crossed your mind (shame on you) then the eponymous debut from Wargirl will go a long way to opening your eyes to the power of percussion – and if it doesn’t, well, go and use your head to make a beat. It can be the drum or the drumstick, you choose. We won’t judge.
It should go on record immediately, though, that despite the presence of both Erick Diego Nieto and Jeff Suri on percussion Wargirl is absolutely not just an exercise in how many drum-hits can be crammed into one 10-track LP – in fact, it is testament to the Long Beach band’s musical prowess that you probably wouldn’t even know that there were multiple tub-thumpers until you’re told. And the reason for that is most likely that you have been instantly, irresistibly hypnotised by the snake-hipped grooves which twist and wind through the entire album, leaving you helpless from the get-go – that or their utterly seamless interaction. Opening track and lead single ‘Poison’ waits all of 1.5 seconds – exactly how long it takes for Samantha Parks to captivate you with her vocal work – before Tamara Raye’s mesmeric bassline takes hold. And Wargirl keep you in their sequinned velvet grip right through to the triumphant closer ‘Last Time’, a globetrotting shapeshifter driven by rainforest percussion and an urgent bass hook which gets right into your soul.
The band is the project of producer, sound engineer and musician extraordinaire Matt Wignall who, bored by the prospect of “some band where there’s four guys playing and one of them singing lead”, set about putting together a group which has precisely none of those things and is almost as far from boring as it gets, handing himself guitar duties “not at all as a lead instrument but as an additional driver”. Drawing on the diversity for which Long Beach is known, the six-piece – three men and three women – generate an intoxicating sound which hoists a disco ball above, variously, a hilltop hippy meet-up (‘Voice of the Mountain’), a fuzzy Doors-esque jam (‘Streets’, anchored by Enya Preston’s keyboards) and lively rock n’ roll twists (‘Mess Around’ and ‘How You Feel’). But don’t trust that chain – in several places the ball drops and shatters and the band cut looser than loose. ‘Sass Girl’ swaggers in a percussive trance over more deep-groove basslines, with Parks turning in her most charismatic performance of the record, and the six-minute ‘I Know I’ is pure muscle and power.
So if Wargirl is proof that having a pair of percussionists is a good thing, we ask ourselves what else could the band do with having two of? That’s an easy one – albums. More of the same please..