I saw White Denim for the first time three years ago when they opened for Tapes’N’Tapes at the 9:30 Club. That night I went for Tapes’N’Tapes and left loving White Denim. They have an energy about them that’s boundless. They do not stop. They aren’t cool, they move, and so do their fans. For them it’s very much about playing together and less about a performance.
When they took the stage at Rock and Roll Hotel on Tuesday, there was a massive push forward. I expect this at fuller shows, but the Hotel was probably at about two-thirds capacity, and people in DC tend to like their personal space. Not Tuesday, post-grad yuppies and high-schoolers alike danced throughout the upbeat set, while those of the still variety stayed rightfully towards the back.
The band is made up of four members, though the sound they produce would have you believe the band is much larger. It’s not rock, or funk or jazz, or jam – it’s all of those things. Everything I liked about them the first time was still soundly intact. Their particular brand of rock (or whatever you’d prefer to call it) isn’t a caricature of their influences, it’s an original combination of everything their predecessors had been inspired by as well. White Denim encompasses all of it. Their ability to transition smoothly between a rock riff into bouncing funk is difficult to keep up with. I didn’t know where one song ended and another began, but that was the point.
They played a healthy mix of older songs as well as songs off their latest release, D. I tried to keep track, to no avail. They didn’t play off a set list, and when I asked guitarist Austin Jenkins and lead vocalist James Petralli to write one for me after the show, they tried their best, but even they couldn’t remember the order or if they had played particular songs. It was just as much a blur to them as it was to us. This mash of songs and styles and different people, all to create what I suppose is White Denim.
