Warlocks Cover the Turf

The music filled the room. Emanating from a trio of guitars, chords resonated with chords and dispersed throughout the Turf Club on Wednesday night, thick and palpable as the fog that periodically came out from the fog machines. Steady percussion from bass and drums crept under the noise to make it danceable (or at least head-nod-able). Though many were sitting stoic at the bar or in the venue’s booths, no one could ignore it: The Warlocks were playing.

The band is touring this summer, often in tandem with The Black Angels, to promote their latest album, Heavy Deavy Skull Lover. The release is darker than their previous outputs, but as one astute concertgoer quipped, "You don’t have to be a depressed teenager to like it."

A sizable group of fans, most of them tattooed and/or flannel’d and/or bandanna’d, huddled near the stage, alternately swaying, grooving, and jamming. Though the vocals were somewhat blurred (intentionally), many were able to sing along with vocalist Bobby Hecksher’s lyrics.

Hecksher himself, more so than any of the other band members, had a commanding presence on stage. It really appeared as if the music were entering him through some aural version of osmosis. Despite the loud-but-mellow tone of the group, he rocked out as if covering only the loudest of Metallica’s canon.

At times it seemed the group was not creating music so much as creating atmosphere, because the layering of distortion and ambient quality defined each song. Yet each song demanded attention, too. The result being that The Warlocks were at once in the foreground and the background of everyone’s ears. Which is kind of a strange sensation – at a concert, one can usually either keep an interior monologue going independent of what’s on stage, or else let the music serve merely as a backdrop for conversation, as jukebox music might. But at the Turf Club, there was no escape, no reprieve. Like drinking water in a swimming pool.

The most common description I’ve seen of their music has been, ‘neo-psychedelic.’ I’m not sure I quite know what this means, but at the same time it feels like a very apt description. The music is reminiscent of The Doors, if one were to elongate and slur every note of a given Doors song. Maybe think of a hard rock group playing as loud as they possibly can in a tunnel that produces lots of echoes, and hearing the music from outside that tunnel.

The downside was that there was a uniform feeling to the performance. While every song was no doubt engaging, about midway through the show, it began to feel repetitive. Each piece might have started out differently – now with a drumbeat, now with a solo guitar riff – but once all the instruments were inevitably added into the mix, homogeneity took over. While The Warlocks have an incredibly distinct style, their sound from song to song remained somewhat the same.

Nevertheless, it was an appealing show. The Warlocks kept dialogue to a minimum between songs (I think Hecksher said, "Thanks for coming out," once, and that’s it), letting the music stand for itself. And even if the set sometimes sounded like one long piece, their style is original enough that one can listen to it for a straight hour or so, and it still does really seem fresh – most bands can’t keep that up for more than four minutes.