Last week, White Denim played two sold-out shows at the Sinclair on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
I had seen them last year at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival and as I expected, it was a few white guys wearing blue jeans. I was interested in seeing them again, because although I remember having a good time, I remember nothing else about it. A lot of this reason is just the experience of seeing a band you have no prior experience with at a festival in between a dozen-plus other bands that you have varying levels of familiarity with. My friend had been excited to see them again and had a much better memory, so I took his lead and went on Wednesday.
Not having much of a takeaway impression from my first White Denim experience turned out to make a lot of sense: I had originally seen them for 30-45 minutes and their main trait as a band, I discovered, was their stamina. Solos that lasted the lengths of the songs of any other band I’d been to see in recent memory, a setlist that, in a modest typeface, completely filled the 8.5x11s at the band’s feet. They are at once perfectly representative of, and completely disserviced by, a festival setting.
After listening to the drastically shifting styles, from pop to noise-rock to blues to metal, and crazy guitar solos from both the lead singer and lead guitarist for a few songs, I realized I was listening to an actual live jam band. I don’t think I’ve seen another jam band in the wild and I was thrown off by a group dressed as a cowboy, emo showgoer, grad student, and guy-in-a-t-shirt, respectively–definitely not the tie-dye I would have expected. The extended jamming wore me down a bit, but that’s also what they were there to do, so maybe I just need to get my head out of my ass. This isn’t to say that every song didn’t thoroughly impress me from a technical standpoint, just not always a creative or catchy one.
The set had a narrative too: the lead singer, James Petralli, who I mentioned as the grad-student-looking dude, came out, buttoned up, glasses, pleasant and doing the normal stage banter. It was a gradual transformation, but as they got jammier and the solos got less rooted in blues-psychedelia and more out there, rhythmically, the shirt got unbuttoned, the glasses came off, the quaff got all sweaty and tossed around.
The fans who flooded Sinclair weren’t the typical jam band crowd, save for the occasional smell of weed. They seemed buttoned-up and pleasant too, so it seemed like he was mirroring what WD was doing the crowd. Everyone entered the Sinclair between their workdays but the band was hellbent on making the room forget everything outside those walls by the end of the night.
They played until past midnight, apologizing for their curfew, but still doing a two song encore that had all the pop-appeal and brevity that the show lacked, proving they are capable of anything.