A part of me expected to be swimming against the tide on Monday and deciding White Denim, hyped to the hilt after the SXSW festival, aren't really all that good and it's been just another industry-led swell. It is, however, a bona fide tidal wave, and it reached Brighton from Texas without breaking.
The music was unbelievably good and painfully hard to describe. It had some of the strict, math-rock tendencies of Foals and their ilk, but bypassed the dullness that often goes hand-in-hand.
Frontman and guitarist Jack Petralli managed to cram broken, angular riffs, psychedelia and basic punk into the frame of one song without losing the plot.
But for all the technicality, they were raw, aggressive and sounded like proper American garage rock.
I thought about what to call the White Denim sound, what the right two or three words could be. Joshua Block, whose incredible drumming guided the adventurous songs from start to finish, helped me out.
"Its just rock 'n' roll," he told me afterwards, exhausted. "We just call it rock 'n' roll and get on with it."
That's exactly it. Perfect.
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