The Warlocks are dark, they wear black leather jackets, dark hipster haircuts, but above everything, they know how to build the ambiance perfectly fitting their druggy dark-psychedelic music with fog machine and strobe lights. The band, whose line-up has changed a lot over the years, is now reduced to five, all guys, whereas there were a few girls in the past. Despite their long career in Los Angeles, I had never seen them live and I can say I have enjoyed their set of 18 songs at the Bootleg theater on Saturday night. This is a band which has been around since 2000, releasing 5 LPs plus a few EPs over a decade, but for some reasons, they have never really left the underground scene, which, in a way, fits them like a velvet glove…
They started with a few songs off their last effort, ‘The Mirror Explodes’, and right away the stone-y tone was there, dark and dim as a never-ending depressing druggy journey, the smog coming from the machine bathing all this monochromatic fuzz and the redish silhouettes moving in slow-motion just like their heavy sludgy distorted sound. After ‘You Make Me Wait’, and ‘Red Camera’, I was beginning to think that the whole set may just wander in this sinister and bleak version of Brian Jonestown Massacre till the end. I was okay with that idea, I was ready for depression and a drug-induced coma, but all this was making the songs really difficult to differentiate from each other.
Then, they let a little bit of light enter their darkness, oh I am not talking about light and upbeat, but at least ‘Zombies like Lovers’ had a faster tempo, the throbbing and hypnotic drone was still there but the whole thing was waking up a little. You could tell from the slightly moving crowd, which hadn’t move a bit since the start of the show… that’s true that we were plunged in some serious shoegazing.
Because of the really heavy atmosphere, I was expecting a deeper voice coming from frontman Bobby Hecksher’s throat, but he was rather soft spoken and there was absolutely nothing scary or sinister about the guy, who was talking to the crowd with a big smile, visibly happy to be there. He announced a new song, ‘Chameleon’, while saying the band was working on new material he was hoping to release soon. His ghostly vocals were kind of buried in the loudness of the layered guitars, but it was John Christian Rees’ crazy-eye expressions and drunken moves, even using a beer bottle to play guitar, which was catching most of my attention.
Still, there was a constant theme, this throbbing note-descending-scale recipe seemed to do the work for almost every song, an endless droning with spiraling guitars lost in an hallucinatory bouillon. However, ‘Hurricane Heart Attack’ changed this, it was more,… Stones’ rocking with the Velvet Underground as a template. No mystery there, they even played their very-VU ‘Song for Nico’, just after ‘Shake the Dope Out’ – the first time I wanted to really move – and ‘Dope Feels Good’; progressing in the set was a progression toward the light after all this darkness. We haven’t played this one in 10 years, said Hecksher before playing ‘Moving Shaking’,… but this retro-psych-fest wasn’t a bad thing at all. ‘Caveman Rock’ was some cool thing too, a sticky and deep psychedelia, just like their long ‘Jam’ ending the show.
Sure, the Warlocks experiment with the past but they do it with talent and ease and nothing even close to pretentiousness. After 13 years in the business, they were still impressed that the show had been moved from the small room to the large one of the Bootleg theater and that says everything.
Setlist
You Make Me Wait
Red Camera
Isolation
Chameleon (new song)
You've Changed
Zombie Like Lovers
Warhorses
Come Save Us
Hurricane Heart Attack
Shake the Dope Out
The Dope Feels Good
Moving and Shaking
Song for Nico
So Paranoid
The Midnight Sun
Caveman Rock
Angry Demons
Jam of the Warlocks
