As far as being a portrayal of the album to come, Let’s Talk About It, the opening track of Texas-natives White Denim’s Workout Holiday collection achieves an A for accuracy. Messily-produced (bear in mind these are rerecorded versions of earlier versions of songs that were, frighteningly, even messier), distorted, sexy, straight-out-of-the-garage and as catchy as plague in the Dark Ages. Unfortunately for the much-hyped noiseniks, it equally suffers from a lack of direction or much semblance of song-writing sophistication. Still, who needs sophistication when you’re this self-assured and suave?
Workout Holiday as a whole has more hooks than a tackle shop, but in individual songs the band tends to take it’s most addictive riff or drum pattern and push it to stage front and centre. While this pushes some songs to the breaking point, it makes them ultimately memorable and instantly recognizable as White Denim tracks, despite their somewhat familiar garage-blues style. Heart From All Of Us is a more structured number, and it’s sweet vocal duet washes over well. All You Really Have To Do’s vocals, on the other hand, are more Kings Of Leon-esque soulful yelp, and all the less enjoyable for it. Nevertheless, Darksided Computer Mouth features the same style of singing, but melds it into the schizoid to-and-froing of the song that makes it the most memorably mad moment of the collection.
White Denim are apparently not great adherents to the classic single and album release format. Having released all the here included songs through digitized means already (via the already cool-as-cola-bottles RCRD LBL, and other sites), the band plan to release their actual album, Exposion, later this year. Their somewhat bric-a-brac approach to releasing suits their sound down to the ground. Workout Holiday works predominantly as a sampler of the WD live experience, and as an iPod Shuffle staple. It storms by quickly and benefits in no way from being lumped together as a set of songs. Under the classic critical perception of an album it is shoddy and piecemeal, but as a 2008 release it is a promising punch in the face to the full-body kicking to come.
