White Denim

Academy 2 has the lowest ceilings I’ve ever seen at a gig venue.  It’s in the basement, beneath the (only slightly) more salubrious main venue in Dublin’s Academy.  It’s almost impossible to see the stage from any more than three or four rows from the front and in the middle of Ireland’s relative heat wave, it’s hot and sticky.  Perfect for White Denim then.  Their sweaty, free-wheeling blend of garage, punk, psychedelic rock and classic soul seems tailor made for such sweatboxes.

And so it proves over a frenzied 55 minute set.  White Denim’s go-anywhere, try-anything song structures can be mildly baffling on record, but they make more sense live, where their set is effectively a near-hour long medley.  Since their songs are mini-medleys in any case, this figures.  Keeping up isn’t easy – there’s a fair bit of mucking around a single groove and after a while it’s pretty much impossible to recall exactly which part of which song they’re playing – but White Denim are generally up to the task.  Occasionally lacking the necessary beef on record, live they have it in spades.  James Petralli is an engaging, bug-eyed frontman and he has the pipes for the job – equal parts blues shouter and soulful crooner.

To these ears White Denim are at their best when they allow a sliver of melody into proceedings.  To this end, it’s a disappointment they don’t play more of the ballads that light up their recent Fits record.  Only Regina Holding Hands is aired, and it stands head and shoulders above the rest of tonight’s set.  It’s clear their live show is based around the blues jams rather than the soul tunes.  Still, when they’re as good as Shake Shake Shake and Mess Your Hair Up no-one in the crowd is complaining.

They finish off with their signature tune Let’s Talk About It, insisting that ‘you’re the only city that will hear this song’.  A lie, surely, but the pogoing front rows lap it up.  There’s no encore – why bother when you can play all your songs together without so much as pausing for breath?